I’m not destroying freedom alone. I have help. For example, from a majority of the U.S. population — DeMint calls them “drug addicts” (page 44) who can’t stop using the government. Also in on the plot is “almost all of the organized political power in America today, [which] is on the side of a larger, more centralized, more socialist government” (page 50).

So…that’s me, 150 million-plus people, “almost all” of the U.S. political establishment — we’re all of us driving the country into the abyss, according to the Republican senator from South Carolina and toast of the Tea Partiers.

Still, I come in for a larger share of the blame than most. In Saving Freedom, DeMint has decided to illustrate what’s wrong with socialism by quoting from an old edition of my book The Case for Socialism.

Early on (page 10), he focuses on an especially sinister statement by me:

Socialism is based on the idea that we should use the vast resources of society to meet people’s needs. It seems so obvious–that if people are hungry, they should be fed; that if people are homeless, we should build homes for them; that if people are sick, all the advances in medical technology should be available to them. A socialist society would take the immense wealth of the rich and use it to meet the basic needs of all society. The money wasted on weapons could be used to end poverty, homelessness, and all other forms of scarcity.

To the untrained eye, that might not sound so bad. It might even sound like a good idea. Perhaps feeding people who are hungry could even advance the cause of freedom — by liberating them from, you know, starvation and death.

Not so. The vision of a society without hunger and homelessness, based on the principles equality and solidarity –this, DeMint insists, is a perversion of freedom, a distortion of “this elusive treasure [that] has thrived in the United States” and made America “the envy of the world.” (pages 57, 31). We socialists — in spite of our “good intentions” (page 11) — have twisted the meaning of freedom:

Socialists are now marching under the banner of a new secular-progressive style of freedom: the freedom from responsibility, the freedom to behave destructively without moral judgment, the freedom from risk and failure, the freedom from want, the freedom from religion, and the freedom to have material equality with those who work harder and accomplish more. (page 8)

When I first read about this banner of bad-freedom that I’ve apparently been marching around with, I wondered if maybe DeMint had me confused with someone else. Like maybe a Wall Street executive, or the head of the coal mining company Massey Energy.

Because the bad-freedoms that we socialists supposedly champion seem like pretty apt descriptions for how those in charge of a capitalist society operate every day.

“Freedom from responsibility”? Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship spends millions of dollars on politicians, judges and lawyers to make sure he doesn’t bear much, if any, responsibility for the fate of the people who mine coal for him. Or the fate of a planet suffering from the climate change that Blankenship thinks is an environmentalist hoax.

“Freedom to behave destructively without moral judgment”? That’s exactly what the Securities and Exchange Commission accuses Goldman Sachs of doing when it created mega-investments that were designed to fail — for the benefit of some hedge fund managers and, oh yes, the bankers who collected huge fees from everybody involved.

“Freedom from risk and failure”? The big banks that were pulled back from the brink when the U.S. government bailed out Wall Street are up to their old tricks again by all accounts, because anybody who’s paid attention for the past two years knows they’re “too big to fail.” And if Republicans like Jim DeMint get their way, the bankers won’t even have to abide by the Democrats’ way-too-tame financial reform proposals.

“Freedom to have material equality with those who work harder and accomplish more”? The ranks of the super-rich are filled with people who never had to do an honest day’s work in their lives and whose only “accomplishment” worth speaking of was getting born to super-rich parents. They don’t have “material equality” with the rest of us — they’re much, much better off than the vast majority of people who have to scramble to get by.

That’s the problem with freedom in the world according to Jim DeMint. Some people have a lot of it — but for the rest of us, not so much.

The bankers, the CEOs, the trust-fund children, the political elite that shuttle back and forth between Washington and the corporate boardrooms — they have the freedom to do most anything they choose, to live where they want and how they want, to satisfy any whim.

For the majority of people who don’t live in this world of wealth and power, our freedoms are much more limited.

We’re free not to work for a particular company, but we’re not free not to work. We’re free to spend or save what we earn from working, but we’re not free to expect that either will necessarily meet all our needs, even after a lifetime of work. We’re free to buy environmentally sustainable products, but we’re not free to change the wider economic system to make it sustainable.

In short, most people in society aren’t free to determine their destiny in any number of ways. They’re subject to conditions of life that they have little say about — conditions that are mostly shaped by that little group of people who have a lot of freedom, and keep it to themselves.

The problems with Jim DeMint’s freedom double standards become more obvious when he presents his view of American history (a questionable view, but a concise one — he gets from 1776 to the Reagan years in under nine pages). To him, the first germs of the coming socialist contagion took hold “soon after the thirteen states ceded ‘limited’ power to the federal government in 1787.” (page 30)

In fact, according to DeMint, America was only really free before it was the United States:

Before the American Revolution, freedom was second nature to Americans. It was bred into our DNA long before the Declaration of Independence and the signing of our Constitution. Established as trading colonies, America was built on capitalism and free trade. Americans were people of good character and strong faith who came to the New World seeking freedom of religion. (page 30)

Personally, I’m not sure I’d vouch for the good character of every person who “came to the New World.”

But more significantly, you’ve probably noticed a few omissions in that passage. Such as: If Americans were the people “who came to the New World,” what about the people who lived in the “New World” before it was the “New World”? What about the Native Americans? In the name of capitalism and free trade, they were driven from their homes, killed outright in horrific numbers, and forced into penal colonies with the innocuous-sounding name of “reservations.” Their freedom appears to have been expendable.

And another question: What about the slaves? They didn’t come to the “New World “seeking freedom of religion,” did they? They were kidnapped from Africa by the millions, forced to endure the unspeakable brutality of the Middle Passage and, if they survived, perform backbreaking labor, without freedoms of any kind, nor the prospect of attaining any.

Unsurprisingly, slavery doesn’t figure in DeMint’s version of U.S. history. The topic comes up exactly once, in a half-sentence a page later: “After the Civil War, which was the result of America’s failure to apply our principles of freedom to slave labor…” (page 31)

There’s more to the rest of that sentence — something about expanding government bureaucracies, blah, blah. But I’m sure you’ll agree that the first part raises a few questions.

“Failure to apply our principles of freedom to slave labor…” Does it give DeMint any pause to consider that half of the America where “freedom was second nature” — the more prosperous and politically powerful half — had “failed to apply the principles of freedom”? What about the fact that the author of the document he swipes as a preface for his book –Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, of course –”failed to apply the principles of freedom”?

And what exactly does it mean to “apply our principles of freedom to slave labor” anyway? Could that be done in any other way except by abolishing slavery? If not, then does DeMint think the Civil War was a good thing? A bad thing?

There’s actually a lesson here — though you won’t find it in DeMint’s book. In the case of the abolition of slavery, the expansion of freedom required a vast struggle against a political system in the South that claimed to stand for freedom.

That struggle didn’t just happen. It took the actions of millions of people — slaves themselves, the abolitionists who opposed slavery, Northerners in the Union Army — to achieve freedom. The same has been true throughout the history of the U.S. or any other country — from the abolition of slavery, to women winning the right to vote, to workers gaining the right to organize unions, and on and on.

To quote Frederick Douglass — whose expertise on the subject of freedom is much superior to Jim DeMint’s: “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle… If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

Jim DeMint’s freedom fraud becomes clear when you see whose freedom he cares about, and whose he doesn’t. He cares about “saving freedom” for the few — especially the freedom of the few to own and control the biggest economic institutions in a capitalist society, and therefore to subject much larger numbers of people to having less freedom in every aspect of their lives.

That’s not the only problem I have with the world according to Jim DeMint. There are so, so many others. Maybe I should start a blog.

For example, DeMint seems to be under the impression that I’m a member of the Democratic Party. He quotes my book again –on the importance of socialists organizing at the grassroots (page 49) — in the midst of a section about the alleged crimes of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

But Obama is quite insistent that he isn’t a socialist, and I think he has a point. If you go through the list of the senior officials in his Treasury Department, for example, very few would call themselves socialists. Many, on the other hand, would call themselves former executives of Goldman Sachs.

The reason that DeMint throws my case for socialism into a chapter about the Democrats is because he identifies socialism with “big government,” and the Democrats, he insists, are the party of “big government.”

This is where the real purpose of Saving Freedom becomes clearer — as a calculated contribution to the right wing’s current political strategy. DeMint and the Republicans want to smear the policies they oppose with the lingering taint of 1950s McCarthyism.

Thus, DeMint gives a highly misleading definition of socialism as “a socioeconomic system in which property and the distribution of wealth are subject to control by the government.” (page 28)

It’s true that socialism is associated with state control of the economy. But that doesn’t mean that all state control is socialist. The first question to ask whenever the government has a role in the economy or society is: Who owns the state?

If the state is shaped by business interests that exert their influence through campaign contributions and lobbying — or if the state is run by a small class of party bosses, using the name of socialism, but presiding over a system of repression and exploitation, as in the ex-USSR, then that isn’t socialism. Any more than this society deserves to be called a democracy because most, but not all, the people who live in it get to vote every few years.

There isn’t a serious discussion about socialism in Saving Freedom — not in a book where every fact is twisted to serve DeMint’s agenda, and every political question is jammed into the confines of his narrow world.

It’s telling that the chapter on how DeMint got involved in national politics starts with a solemn retelling of an episode of the old Andy Griffith Show — one that ends with Andy’s son Opie learning a lesson about standing up to bullies, which DeMint claims has guided his political career.

Now, it’s weird enough when a grown man claims to have learned life lessons from a fictional child on a sit-com made half a century ago. But when those lessons have political overtones, things get really creepy.

As you may remember, the Andy Griffith Show is about life in a fictional small town in North Carolina. It broadcast its first show in October 1960.

Something else happened in North Carolina in 1960. On February 1, four Black students sat in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro. They set off a tide of sit-in protests that swept across the state and then the South in a few months, kicking the civil rights movement into high gear.

The years during which the Andy Griffith Show was broadcast (1960 to 1968) were years when history was made — when one of the most significant grassroots struggles in the world triumphed over the system of American apartheid. But you’d never know it from the Andy Griffith Show. It was set in the South during the high point of the civil rights struggle, and never portrayed a Black character in any prominent role.

That gives you a sense of the world according to Jim DeMint. It’s not one that necessarily welcomes Black people, for one thing — and it’s certainly not one that values dissent or struggle.

But, hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Senator Jim can explain to me why the Andy Griffith Show is inclusive, like his vision for America. Maybe he can convince me why it’s a dire threat to freedom to look forward to a socialist society that ends hunger and homelessness and poverty forever.

I invite him to respond. I have some pull at SocialistWorker.org. We’d happily publish a debate on our Web site. I’ll meet for a public forum in Washington, or maybe on neutral turf somewhere between South Carolina and Chicago.

Let’s thrash this out. He thinks that socialism is destroying freedom. I think that capitalism makes a mockery of any possibility of genuine freedom or democracy. Bring it on.

Barack Obama’s administration and party leaders in Congress have given up without a fight on a single-payer system that could actually solve the health care crisis — and they’re allowing the measures they do claim to support to be gutted of anything that might make a difference.

Support for a radical overhaul of the health care system, with a leading role for government-run programs, has never been greater. But with health care legislation expected to take shape over the coming weeks, it seems like Democrats are giving away the store before it even opens — in the name of bipartisanship and political “realism.”

This is already a pattern with Barack Obama’s White House — promises of “change we can believe in” raise expectations, but the administration concedes to business and conservative political interests on all the important questions, and we’re left with policies that differ little, if at all, with the status quo.

History shows there’s only one way to break that pattern — a struggle from below that forces the politicians to cave to our side.

Obama promised that all sides would be represented in the debate over health care policy, but one proposal was excluded from the start — single-payer, which would eliminate for-profit private insurance companies and cover all Americans under a government system.

While the administration rolled out the red carpet for industry representatives, advocates of single-payer had to kick up a fuss just to be invited to the White House summit on health care in March.

Obama even concedes that single-payer would be the way to go “if I were starting a system from scratch” — but that it would be economically and politically untenable now. Instead, Obama’s proposal revolves around a so-called “public option” — the creation of a government-run plan that would be a competitor with private ones, giving people a choice if they didn’t like their other options and “keeping the private insurers honest,” in Obama’s words.

The problem is a public option would still leave private insurance intact, and enjoying unhindered profits from the market for employer-based health insurance, which covers the majority of Americans. Since 78 percent of people who had to file for bankruptcy in 2007 because of overwhelming health care costs started out with insurance when they got sick, it’s clear that the health care crisis isn’t just about insuring the uninsured.

Nevertheless, Obama’s “public option” will seem appealing to many people as at least a step in the right direction — and maybe even progress toward the goal of a nationalized system, since a government-run option that provides quality care without the inflated costs and lack of accountability of private insurers would certainly appeal to a lot of people.

But this is exactly why big business is working so hard to make sure any public option would be crippled from the start by restrictions and limitations — and therefore unable to succeed as an effective alternative.

Moderate Democrats and a few Republicans are floating elaborate schemes and formulas to constrain the public option — for example, splitting up control of a public plan among third-party regional administrators or, worse, all 50 states. Other proposals would require the public option to operate exactly as private insurers do — or put off its creation for years, and then only if it were “triggered” by the private system failing to meet certain (easily manipulated) criteria.

These proposals would guarantee that a public option is a failure. The only way for a public plan to bring down costs and premiums — and thereby out-compete private insurers — is if it used its leverage as a national program to bargain with drug companies and health care providers for lower costs.

Of course, the insurance industry would rather not have a public option at all. It’s mounting a multimillion-dollar p.r. campaign to smear a public plan as “unfair” — as if the standard by which fairness should be judged is insurance company profit rates rather than the quality of health care for actual people.

But if the health care bosses do have to tolerate a “public option” in some form, they want it to be as hamstrung as they can make it.

Remember, the health care industry isn’t just thinking about profits drying up if a “public option” succeeds. If private insurers can keep the government from encroaching on their market, there are huge sums of money to be made off health care reform. Legislation will be designed to get health coverage for the uninsured, in one way or another. If the plan subsidizes the uninsured going into private plans, that’s upwards of 50 million new customers to extract money from over the coming years.

This ought to be the perfect moment for supporters of genuine health care reform to make their case.

For one thing, the right wing is still working off the same old discredited talking points — the myths that a government-run system would be inefficient, too expensive and prone to bureaucracy.

Anyone who’s had to battle an HMO to get approval for an operation or see a specialist or any of a million other pieces of privatized red tape will doubt these claims immediately.

But even on their terms, the lies about government health care programs are easily exposed. For example, between 1997 and 2006, health spending per person (for similar benefits) grew by 4.6 percent per year under the Medicare system, and by 7.3 percent annually under private health insurance. Medicare enrollees rank their health coverage more favorably than those in private insurance plans. And as far as bureaucracy is concerned, average administrative costs in the Medicare system are around 2 or 3 percent–compared to more than 25 percent for private insurers.

“If Democrats enact a public-option health-insurance program,” Republican strategist Karl Rove warned darkly from his new perch on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, “America is on the way to becoming a European-style welfare state.”

The question that will come immediately to mind for millions of Americans is: What the hell is wrong with that?

This is an important point. The reason a single-payer system is considered “politically unrealistic” isn’t because Americans won’t support it. A January New York Times/CBS opinion poll, for example, found that 59 percent of people are in favor of government-provided national health insurance. Even the less favorable surveys show a 50-50 split.

And half the popular opposition that does exist to single-payer would disappear overnight if a political leader of the stature of Barack Obama spoke openly and honestly about what’s wrong with the for-profit system — and why a government-run system would be better.

No, the reason single-payer is dismissed as a “pipe dream” is that Corporate America wants it that way — and it has the power over Republicans, Democrats and the media establishment to make sure that this has become the conventional wisdom.

But the real pipe dream is the idea that some form of a public option — inevitably compromised and constrained by members of Congress counting votes, and by an administration that doesn’t want to alienate business interests — will solve health care crisis.

It won’t — and under the proposals floating around Congress right now, it will make things worse.

So the question that needs to be asked of those who promote Obama’s public option proposal as a “realistic” alternative to single-payer is: Why should we be for something we don’t want? Shouldn’t we instead speak up for what we do want?

That’s not to say that a single-payer victory is around the corner. Health care is big business — worth $2.4 trillion a year in the U.S. economy and about 18 percent of gross domestic product. The wealthy corporations that profit from the system won’t be giving that up without a fight.

But by the same token, our side won’t win any reforms worth having by accepting the limitations of what’s “realistic” — because that means accepting what the industry is willing to give up.

We also won’t win anything without a struggle. In the absence of pressure from below, the politicians are certain to concede to the pressure of corporate interests from above.

Right now, a small but important core of activists — health care workers chief among them — are continuing the fight for single-payer. This core needs the support of the labor movement and other organizations of working people to grow stronger.

There aren’t any short cuts. The struggle for single-payer has to start where it finds itself, develop new ways to connect with the widespread sentiment for fundamental change — and keep building a voice that will be heard in the current debate, and in the years to come.

But it’s autoworkers, not management, who will take the worst beating under the “rescue” that Congress is engineering.

With the Big Three joining the array of banks and businesses saved by the government, the question “Where’s the bailout for the rest of us?” takes on a particularly sharp form in this case: Why should the government hand over $15 billion in loans to incompetent executives when it could take over the auto companies outright for roughly the same amount of money–and put the workers who know them from the bottom up in charge of transforming the U.S. car industry?

Democratic congressional leaders announced December 8 that they had finalized a proposal to grant $15 billion in bridge loans to the carmakers.

In contrast to the all-but-no-strings-attached rescues for big Wall Street banks, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler would have to accept strict government oversight to get the loans, with a board of Cabinet secretaries led by a so-called “car czar” to hold the companies accountable for their business strategies and major financial transactions.

According to reports, the congressional Democrats’ proposal stops short of measures put forward by the Bush White House that would have amounted to what the New York Times called an “out-of-court bankruptcy proceeding.”

Still, this would be a dramatic government intervention in the auto industry–underlining both the scale of the crisis for the car companies and the importance of the industry to the U.S. economy as a whole.

The three companies went to Washington for help in the summer, as gas prices peaked at over $4 a gallon. Congress came up with $25 billion in loan guarantees, to be used specifically to help car companies retool fast to produce smaller, fuel-efficient vehicles.

Now, gas prices are back below $2 a gallon, but the car companies are doing even worse. For November, sales were down 37 percent at Ford, 41 percent at GM and 47 percent at Chrysler over the year before.

GM is in the worst financial position of the three. When CEO Rick Wagoner testified before Congress earlier this month, the company revealed that its balance sheet showed a “$60 billion negative net worth position at September 30, 2008.”

For GM especially, the bridge loans Congress is proposing are a stopgap measure that will tide it over for only a few months. Nevertheless, in return for the money–or, in Ford’s case, the promise of loans in the future if its sales deteriorate further–the companies are vowing to limit executive pay, shake up product lines and, above all, slash production jobs and close factories.

At GM, the reorganization plan presented to Congress calls for shedding 30,000 jobs–at a company that has already downsized from 466,000 hourly workers in 1978 to 112,000 in 2006.

United Auto Workers (UAW) President Ron Gettelfinger accused Congress of making union members bear the brunt of the punishment with its bailout plan. Nevertheless, the UAW announced it would make major concessions on contracts negotiated last year, including suspending a “job bank” program for laid-off workers and allowing companies to put off payments into a new fund for retiree health care benefits.

In other words, for autoworkers, Congress’ “rescue” won’t look much different from the alternative.

“Detroit automakers can achieve the boon of bankruptcy–wage and benefit cuts–without all the financial disruption,” wrote recently retired autoworker and UAW dissident Gregg Shotwell. “Congress will demand ‘shared sacrifice,’ which translates into deferred compensation for shareholders and executives, and unrecoverable losses for workers and retirees.”

Even with these conditions extracted from the UAW and the Big Three, the Democrats’ proposal isn’t a done deal. The Bush administration is said to be close to an agreement on the proposal, but congressional Republicans are threatening to block the legislation with a Senate filibuster.

Their alternative is to let the car companies go to the wall. Thus, former Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney wrote a New York Times op-ed article titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” Back during the primaries, when Romney was desperate to win votes in Michigan to save his failing campaign, he spouted populist talk about helping out American workers. Now, apparently, he sees a political advantage in talking out of the other side of his mouth.

If the Republican right got its way, the effect of the failure of the auto industry would be immense.

According to the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research, a complete collapse of the Big Three would cost about 1.3 million jobs directly at the car companies and their suppliers, and another 1.7 million jobs from the overall effect. States like Michigan, already devastated by deindustrialization, would suffer an immense blow, and the federal government would lose $60 billion in tax revenues and other costs in the first year alone, according Robert Weissman of Multinational Monitor.

Fifty-five years ago, the president of GM sat in a congressional hearing room and announced that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”

Now, the former crown jewel of American capitalism has been reduced to going before Congress to ask for money on any terms that lawmakers care to set.

The contrast with the bailout of Wall Street is stark. The recent Citigroup rescue, for example, involved the U.S. government taking $20 billion in preferred shares on top of $25 billion in stock acquired earlier in October–that is, three times more than the Big Three together would get in bridge loans. Plus, the Bush administration put taxpayers on the hook for more than $300 billion in potentially bad debt, and the top management and board of directors were left intact.

But if auto company executives are feeling the insult, the injury to autoworkers is worse–not least, the claim, rampant in the media, that inflated wages and overly generous benefits are at the source of the auto crisis.

For example, as the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) pointed out, mainstream media outlets regularly report that “Ford, Chrysler and GM pay union workers more than $73 an hour in wages and benefits,” whereas Japanese automakers with plants in the U.S. “shell out just over $44,” according to ABC News.

But that’s a statistical sleight of hand, created by adding in the cost of benefits for the large number of retired workers for the Big Three. When current employees are compared, labor costs are roughly the same at the U.S. and Japanese auto plants in the U.S.

Plus, the Big Three have wrung huge concessions from the UAW, including a second-tier wage in the 2007 contract, under which new hires start at as low as $14 an hour, well below pay at the nonunion, foreign-owned “transplants.”

The sad fact is that wages and benefits at the Big Three have been pushed down so far–and demands for sped-up production ratcheted up so high–that labor costs amount to less than the companies pay for hubcaps and fenders, according to Labor Notes’ Mark Brenner and Jane Slaughter.

The problem isn’t overpaid autoworkers, but overpaid and incompetent auto executives. Thus, the same bunch that wants money today to retool for building fuel-efficient vehicles was congratulating itself a decade ago, in an era of low gas prices, for its focus on the gas-guzzling SUV market–and resisting every call for higher fuel-efficiency standards and anti-pollution measures.

All of which begs the question: Why has Congress produced a “rescue” plan for the auto industry that depends on auto company executives and their version of “restructuring”? Why not a proposal that gets rid of the bunglers at the top who caused the crisis and sets new priorities for a revitalized industry?

Nationalizing the auto industry hardly seems radical given the scale of the crisis. At current stock prices, General Motors could be bought out for $2.8 billion. The market value for Ford is $6.1 billion. Why not save the $15 billion in loans, with many times that sure to come, and take over the Big Three?

As Jerry Tucker, a former UAW official and leading voice of the union reform movement, said in an interview with radio host Aimee Allison:

It’s not the management who can actually change the direction; perhaps the government ought to look at the role of ownership of the companies and move it towards the concept of being a production center for new transportation ideas in this country. We’ve never had transportation policy, and we’ve never had energy policy, both of which we need sorely.

That really would be “a bailout for the rest of us”–and it wouldn’t stop with the auto industry. For example, it is true that GM, Ford and Chrysler face a disadvantage because they pay at least part of the cost of health care and retirement benefits for workers, while foreign competitors can rely on a national health and pension system in their home countries.

“That burden could be lifted, to the benefit of 47 million uninsured Americans, by adopting a Medicare-style program for everyone,” Mark Brenner and Jane Slaughter wrote in an op-ed article. “It would save the nation as much as $350 billion per year now spent for insurance companies to shuffle paper and deny claims.”

Congress’ bailout proposal for the auto industry is really for the auto executives, just like the rescue of Wall Street was about saving wealthy bankers and investors. To change that will take organizing and struggle.

It’s the specter of “socialism”, in the form of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama and his alleged determination to “spread the wealth around.”

It comes as a little bit of a surprise to us that Barack Obama is one of us, because we haven’t seen him at any of the meetings.

But Michelle Malkin is certain about it. “There’s no question,” the right-wing commentator declared, “that Barack Obama has been steeped in and marinated with the socialist ethos.” Talk radio host Glenn Beck fumed, “I believe there’s a socialist agenda there for America.”

Adds one-time contender for the Republican presidential nomination Mike Huckabee: “When you punish people for making more money, and you reward them for nothing, that is socialism. And that’s a terrible, terrible way for this country to move.”

So what is this national tragedy in the making? The McCain campaign (including its new national mascot, Joe the Plumber) is irate about Obama’s proposal to rescind tax cuts enacted under George Bush for households with an adjusted gross income of $250,000 and over — the richest 2.3 percent of U.S. taxpayers, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

The income tax rate for the very top rung of the ladder would rise (as it was scheduled to anyway in 2010 when the Bush cuts expire) from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, where it stood under the Clinton administration. “This is a very modest — you might even say, timid — response to what has, in the last 15 years, been a redistribution of wealth from the bottom up to the top,” Rick MacArthur of Harper’s magazine said in an interview on Democracy Now!

This is what’s so “terrible, terrible”? Restoring tax rates for the very richest Americans to the levels of the 1990s — during which time, incidentally, the U.S. economy underwent the longest sustained expansion since the Second World War, so the wealthy couldn’t have been that bad off?

Thanks to John McCain, millions of people must be asking themselves: If expecting the rich to pay a little more in taxes is “socialist,” what’s wrong with socialism?

The desperate McCain campaign is betting on a piece of conventional wisdom that both main parties cling to: That ordinary people will rebel against any form of tax increase — in fact, they’ll probably vote for whichever candidate promises the bigger tax cut.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media pronounce authoritatively that even people with modest incomes oppose higher taxes on the rich, because they expect to make it into the ranks of the wealthy someday themselves.

But that’s not accurate. There is support for taxes among ordinary people, even higher taxes, but only if they think something worthwhile will be done with the money. For example, opinion surveys show a majority of people in favor of more government spending on education and health care, even if that means higher taxes. Among adults under 30, the sentiment is even stronger — upwards of 90 percent in favor.

Of course, the government never does seem to spend money on those priorities, or anything else worthwhile. Instead, the political system operates beyond the control of working people. Case in point: The U.S. government is set to match the $1 trillion-plus price tag for a war on Iraq that a majority of people oppose, with a bailout of Wall Street and the banks that will cost at least as much, and that is also opposed by the majority.

So most people are, naturally and understandably, suspicious of taxes. And the Republican Party — which devotes itself in office to making sure that government doesn’t do anything useful for working people –t hen plays both sides against the middle by exploiting sentiment against taxes.

Not that most Democrats are any better. Obama’s response to the ludicrous claim that he was advocating socialism was to disavow any desire to “spread the wealth.” Instead, Obama said — in a classic example of politician-speak — he wants to “spread the opportunity.” His campaign platform is carefully tailored to emphasize a range of tax breaks — and not just for the “middle class,” but small and big businesses under a variety of circumstances.

So it’s little wonder that Comrade Obama is holding onto his supporters in traditionally Republican business circles. For example, according to MacArthur, Obama has collected $740,000 in bundled campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs, the super-bank that’s leading the way in Wall Street’s shift behind the “tax-and-spend” Democrats.

McCain’s attack line about taxes produced a stream of the standard complaints from conservatives about how taxes are unfair because the rich pay at a higher rate than the poor. But this is a distortion of how the tax system actually works in the U.S.

First, no one in the over-$250,000 category ever pays 35 percent today, or paid 39.6 percent before Bush, on all their income — unless their tax accountant is incompetent. There are all kinds of loopholes and deductions available to those at the top.

Plus, most taxes other than the income tax are “regressive,” not “progressive”, meaning they’re more of a burden the poorer you are. For example, state and local sales taxes are a flat rate charged on products that people have to buy, which means that lower-income households end up spending a higher portion of their income on sales taxes than higher-income households.

The same thing is true about the federal payroll tax for Social Security and Medicare. But the effect there is even worse because the tax for Social Security isn’t collected after an individual’s income reaches $102,000 in a year. So payroll taxes, too, are a far greater burden on workers. Multibillionaire Warren Buffett, by his own admission, pays less in federal taxes than his secretary because of the effect of the payroll tax.

The other side of the conservative argument is that the rich not only pay more, but they get less, the implication being that most government services go to the poor. Thus, John McCain claimed that “Barack Obama’s tax plan would convert the IRS into a giant welfare agency.”

But this is also false. To start with, just look at the summary of the federal budget and see how a program like food stamps stacks up against, for example, the Pentagon’s purchases from military contractors.

Beyond that, ask yourself this question: Do you think the government would build a new expressway on-ramp to make it more convenient for you to get to work? Certainly not. But the executives and shareholders of corporations like UPS demand this kind of infrastructure project when they plan for new facilities.

The biggest drug companies make use of federally funded research in developing new products. And, of course, the oil giants can count on the U.S. military — whichever party occupies the White House — to ensure a steady flow of Middle East oil, no matter what the toll in human misery.

In reality, the mantra that “big government is bad” — shared by most Republicans and Democrats for the past several decades — applies only to certain kinds of big government.

Thus, when there was money to be made off high-stakes gambling in the Wall Street casino, the banks and hedge funds and investment firms wanted regulators to keep away. But now that the boom has gone bust, only a multitrillion-dollar bailout from the federal government can stop the system from grinding to a halt, and even that might not be enough.

Not only that, but there won’t even be any sacrificing at bonus time this year. According to the Guardian, salaries and bonuses for top executives and employees at major banks and investment firms will add up to $70 billion this year. So 10 percent of the $700 billion that Congress committed to “rescue” Wall Street will end up “rescuing” the bank accounts of some of Wall Street’s richest players.

Now that’s redistributing the wealth.

When you look at the bigger picture, the U.S. government, its tax system included, serves as a very effective tool of wealth redistribution, but upward, from workers and the poor to the very richest people in society. Obama’s modest increase in the income tax for top taxpayers won’t turn this tide.

There’s an even more fundamental deception hidden in the conservatives’ arguments about taxes,for example, Mike Huckabee’s claim that Obama’s tax proposal would “punish people” who made money, while “rewarding” other people who did “nothing.”

Punishment? The biggest lie of all is that the rich do anything special to deserve the vast sums they possess.

The disaster on Wall Street provides ample evidence. Every top executive at the big banks was raking in tens of millions of dollars for heading up sophisticated gambling operations — and running them into the ground over the past several years. Thus, Richard Fuld Jr., former CEO of the Lehman Brothers investment bank, made a half-a-billion-dollar fortune selling his stake in the company as it was crashing toward bankruptcy.

This isn’t just true about disgraced Wall Street bookies, but generally about those who run the capitalist economy and its political institutions.

At most, the top executives and owners of big corporations organize the process by which something useful is produced or takes place. But they get to exercise this control not because of any special talent or ability they possess, not, at least, compared to the collective knowledge and skills of those who do the actual producing and who typically know much more about what takes place in a workplace than the managers above them.

The economic power of those at the top comes from their connection to ownership, whether they’re owners themselves, or they manage the enterprises in the name of owners who do even less work.

The vast majority of people who are rich in this society got that way because they were lucky, in a few cases like Bill Gates, lucky enough to associate themselves with a product or technological innovation that took off; in others, lucky enough to know the right people who helped them in the scramble to the top; in still others, lucky enough to be born into incredible wealth.

And if it’s true that the rich don’t do anything special to deserve to be rich, the opposite is also true — nothing that much larger numbers of working people do justifies the difficulties they face, whether it’s those who suffer outright destitution or the larger group of people who get by, but have to struggle to make ends meet.

One of the most hilarious moments of the whole Obama-is-a-socialist farce came a few days ago when a right-wing wacko, masquerading as a television journalist from a local Florida station, asked during an interview with Joe Biden:

You may recognize this famous quote: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” That’s from Karl Marx. How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?

Biden rightly wanted to know whether the question was a joke, before retreating to the campaign position that Obama didn’t want to spread anybody’s wealth, etcetera, etcetera.

But this controversy does raise the question: What would be so terrible about a society organized around such a principle?

The standard answer is that without the promise of profit and riches, no one would do any work.

But is that true? Does that square with the reality of most people’s lives? Think about the jobs that people you know have chosen, or the activities they volunteer to be part of, or the interests they pursue in the time they have to themselves — and ask if it’s true that they wouldn’t do anything useful for society but for the reward of big bucks or the threat of poverty?

It says a lot about the view of human nature under capitalism that people are seen as motivated primarily by either the carrot or the stick.

A genuine socialist society would spread the wealth around — without apologies — because its top priority would be to meet the needs of every person in it. Organizing such a society would require new forms of democracy so that everyone could have a say in how resources were used, what was produced, how it was produced and so on. The goal would be a world where every person could have control over their lives and the opportunity to follow their aspirations and hopes.

In short: From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.

Troy came within hours of being executed last year before the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles granted a stay of execution so the courts could consider evidence that his supporters believe shows his innocence. But the Georgia Supreme Court rejected that appeal in a 4-3 decision, over the strong objections of several justices.

That opened the way for a new execution date, and Troy’s fate may again lie with the pardons board. His supporters were shocked by the announcement of an execution date because Troy has an appeal being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court, which isn’t scheduled to discuss the case until after he is scheduled to be killed.

Activists are bracing themselves for a new drive to save Troy. Letter, faxes, petitions, e-mails and phone calls are pouring in to the pardons board and state officials from all over the world. The ACLU has been holding weekly “Tuesday for Troy” rallies in Atlanta, and Amnesty International has rescheduled a march in support of Troy for September 11 to put further pressure on the pardons board.

“Troy’s case has garnered attention from all over the world, and people will not stand for this injustice,” said Troy’s sister and most outspoken advocate, Martina Correia. “Georgia is under a microscope, and they don’t look good. Troy Davis shouldn’t be executed nor spend the rest of his life in prison for something he did not do.”

Troy was convicted and sent to death row for the 1989 murder of a police officer in Savannah, Ga., while he was off duty and working as a security guard.

As Marlene Martin of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty pointed out in the International Socialist Review, police and prosecutors wanted to solve the case fast. “In short order [after the killing], 25 fellow officers were assigned to the case and began to scour the neighborhood for the perpetrator,” Martin wrote. “The media sensationalized the case of a 27-year-old white father of two shot in the line of duty. One officer told a reporter, ‘There is a desire among the police to have the suspect locked away before McPhail is buried.’”

A few days later, Davis was arrested. Two years later, he was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that lasted all of 10 days.

Davis’ conviction wasn’t based on physical evidence–no murder weapon was ever recovered, and prosecutors don’t claim to have fingerprint evidence or tests showing gunpowder residue on his hands from firing a weapon.

Troy was found guilty on the basis of testimony from nine people who identified him. But of those nine, seven have recanted their testimony, with several saying in sworn affidavits that they were pressured by police to finger Troy. One, Monty Holmes, stated, “I was real young at that time, and here they were questioning me about the murder of a police officer, like I was in trouble or something. I was scared…It seemed like they wouldn’t stop questioning me until I told them what they wanted to hear. So I did.”

Of the two witnesses who haven’t changed their story, one identified the shooter as left-handed, and Troy is right-handed–and the other, Sylvester Coles, was considered by police to be the prime suspect in the case until he came forward to claim to that Troy was guilty. Three people who weren’t called to testify at Troy’s trial say they heard Coles admit he committed the killing.

No jury has ever heard any of this, however–because one court after another rejected Troy’s appeals. Earlier this year, the Georgia Supreme Court refused a motion for a new trial. Justice Harold Meltin, who wrote the opinion justifying the decision, declared, “We simply cannot disregard the jury’s verdict in this case.”

The court’s chief justice, Leah Ward Sears, pointed out the absurdity of Meltin’s argument in registering her opposition to the decision: “If recantation testimony, either alone or supported by other evidence, shows convincingly that prior trial testimony was false, it simply defies all logic and morality to hold that it must be disregarded categorically.”

One prominent factor in the courts’ obstinate refusal to hear the new evidence is the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Signed into law by Bill Clinton, the legislation further restricts the ability of death row prisoners to challenge their convictions on the federal level.

Now, Troy is once again facing execution for a crime he didn’t commit. But his supporters aren’t giving up. “We are a family of fighters, and this is only making us fight harder,” says Martina Correia. “We have to stand up to these people.”

Make your opposition to Troy Davis’ execution heard. Telephone Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles Chair Gale Buckner at 404-657-9350, or fax her at 404-651-6670. Call Georgia Attorney General Thurbert E. Baker at 404-656-3300, or fax him at 404-657-8733. Call Chatham County District Attorney Spencer Lawton at 912-652-7328, or fax him at 912-447-5396.

Amnesty International has called for a rally on September 11 [2] at 6 p.m. on the front steps of the Georgia State Capitol building in Atlanta. For more information, call 404-876-5661 ext. 13, or e-mail: gro.asuianull@yort.

Find out more about Troy’s case and how you can get involved at the Troy Anthony Davis Web site. You can send words of encouragement to Troy by writing to: Troy A. Davis 657378, GDCP P.O. Box 3877 G-3-79, Jackson, GA 30233.

Marlene Martin’s “Anatomy of a frameup,” published in the new issue of the International Socialist Review, documents the long history of injustices in Troy’s case. Troy’s sister, Martina Correia, was interviewed in the New Abolitionist, newsletter of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, in an article titled “The fight for my brother Troy.”

See the Campaign to End the Death Penalty Web site to learn more about the struggle against capital punishment across the country.

If there were any justice, he might have experienced something of the final moments of the many people for whose deaths he should — in some measure at least — be held responsible.

Like Medgar Evers, shot in the back by a Ku Klux Klan member outside his home in Mississippi in 1963, staggering 30 feet before collapsing in agony. Helms emerged in political life as part of the Jim Crow segregationist power structure in the South — the official face of Klan terrorism — and he never, to the end of his life, acknowledged its crimes.

Or the American nuns who were raped and murdered by the right-wing death squads in El Salvador, four victims among tens of thousands in the 1980s. The Salvadoran paramilitaries were a special favorite of Helms — he once said of the Hitler-loving death-squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson that he was “a free enterprise man and deeply religious.”

Or any of the 6 million children around the world who die every year of hunger or related diseases. As a senator for 30 years, Helms led the crusade to reduce U.S. international aid to what he called “foreign rat holes.”

The list of deaths where Jesse Helms might have stood trial as an accessory to murder could go on and on. Which makes it all the more infuriating to read the sanctimonious tributes paid to him after his death.

The obituaries came, of course, with polite disapproval of the indefensible — like Helms’ 1983 Senate filibuster against legislation to establish a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King. But Helms was nevertheless celebrated as a man of “stubborn principle.” Never mind that the principles Jesse Helms actually stood for would make most people’s skin crawl.

George Bush called Helms “a kind, decent and humble man.” But Jesse Helms was none of these things. He was a cold-hearted defender of wealth, privilege and power at any cost, an opponent of justice and equality and a shameless self-promoter; and if he excelled at anything, it was the cynical manipulation of the U.S. political system toward these indecent ends.

Helms got his start in politics working on the 1950 Senate campaign of Willis Smith in North Carolina — justly known as one of the sleaziest in the history of American politics.

Smith challenged the incumbent senator, Frank Porter Graham, as the representative of the hard-line segregationists who had backed Strom Thurmond’s 1948 States’ Rights Party presidential campaign. Among the ads created by Helms and his team: “White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.”

Another ad featured a doctored photo of Graham’s wife dancing with a Black man. Helms’ biographer has documented that Helms himself manipulated the image.

Smith won, and Helms went to Washington to serve as a Senate staffer. When he came back to North Carolina, it was as executive director of the state’s banking association, a connection that proved helpful for political fundraising in years to come.

Helms won a seat on the Raleigh city council and got a job as a television commentator, where he became known for his thundering attacks on the civil rights movement as a cabal of communists and “moral degenerates.” He regularly referred to the University of North Carolina as the “University of Negroes and Communists.”

As the civil rights movement gathered strength, Helms helped to deliver the counter-threats of deadly violence from the forces of the state and the Klan. “The Negro cannot count forever,” he warned in a 1963 commentary, “on the kind of restraint that has thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic and interfere with other men’s rights.” That summer, Klansmen Byron de la Beckwith, took his revenge on Medgar Evers.

All this time, Helms was a Democrat. The Jim Crow South had been ruled by the “Dixiecrats” from the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction a century before. But by the early 1970s, in the wake of the upheavals of the civil rights struggle and the 1960s social movements, the political landscape of the South was shifting.

Helms changed parties to the Republicans and ran for the U.S. Senate in 1972, and he brought with him the traditions of the Dixiecrats in honoring Robert E. Lee and singing “Dixie,” the anthem of the Confederacy, at party events — with the aim of winning over white voters angered by the Democrats’ identification with civil rights.

As a senator, Helms never wavered from the right-wing agenda, no matter what the issue. He heaped abuse on gay and lesbian rights, and compared abortion rights to the Nazi Holocaust. He led the attempt to gut the National Endowment for the Arts, because it was “promoting the homosexual agenda.”

“Helms favors a big-spending, activist government — one that aids those in economic power,” wrote journalist Eric Bates in a 1995 article for Mother Jones. “He voted to bail out the savings and loan industry, for example, and has seldom met a big-ticket missile system he didn’t like. By contrast, he has voted to slash school lunches for impoverished children, medical care for disabled veterans, prescription drugs for the elderly, and wages for working families.”

In particular, Helms made his mark on foreign policy as a leading Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Helms was a zealous opponent of any left-wing force in Latin America and a booster for some of the most corrupt, violent and dictatorial regimes the U.S. ever sponsored.

The Helms-Burton law, passed under Bill Clinton, bars the U.S. from normalizing relations with Cuba as long as Fidel Castro or his brother Raul are part of the country’s government. As one of his last acts, Helms helped orchestrate the campaign against Haiti’s democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, setting the stage for the U.S.-backed coup against Aristide in 2004.

But whatever his other lowlights, Helms’ political career was most closely associated with racism.

Faced with a tight battle for reelection in 1990 and 1996 against African American Democrat Harvey Gantt, Helms reached back to the tactics of the early days. One campaign commercial from 1990 showed a white fist crumpling up a job application, with these words underneath: “You needed that job . . . but they had to give it to a minority.”

In the end, this grotesque appeal to racism symbolizes the lasting political significance of Jesse Helms.

Beyond his own personal success (five terms in the Senate, and, not coincidentally, a millionaire), Helms was an essential figure in the remaking of the Republican Party. His National Congressional Club became one of the most important political fundraising machines in Washington, promoting right-wing forces within the Republican Party that set the agenda in the 1980s and after.

And as a Southern Democrat-turned-Republican, Helms personified the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” of using racism to win a new electoral base. After the civil rights movement, the language had to be different — open white supremacy was discredited. But politicians like Helms excelled at using issues like crime, busing and affirmative action to rehabilitate the use of racism in U.S. politics.

Helms’ own success was reflected in the triumph of Ronald Reagan–who Helms could legitimately claim to have rescued from political obscurity.

In 1976, Reagan ran against Gerald Ford, the incumbent president handpicked by Richard Nixon before he resigned, for the Republican presidential nomination. Reagan was defeated in all the early primaries. But in North Carolina, Helms mobilized his political machine and delivered an upset victory that allowed Reagan to keep the battle going until finally giving up at the Republican convention.

Four years later, Reagan won the nomination, and he returned Helms’ favor by kicking off his 1980 presidential campaign with a call for “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Miss., the site of the Klan’s 1964 killings of three civil rights workers.

Helms’ racist attack ads — veiled and not-so-veiled — became a staple for Republican candidates, from George Bush Sr.’s “Willie Horton” commercial against Michael Dukakis to the latest atrocities served up about Barack Obama.

Long-time adviser Carter Wrenn wasn’t exaggerating when he said that Helms caused “the realignment of the Republican Party…You can’t really separate the growth of the Republican Party from Jesse’s career.”

Considering the misery and suffering inflicted by three decades of the right-wing agenda setting the terms of U.S. politics, there isn’t any more damning indictment of Jesse Helms.

It was a point that deserved to be made more often. Clinton’s remade campaign image as a populist fighting for the “little guy” was in stark contrast to her long history as a fixture of the Democratic Party establishment and defender of corporations like Wal-Mart.

But maybe Obama had his reasons for keeping quiet about the Beast of Bentonville.

With the nomination finally in hand, Obama announced he was adding a team of political advisers straight out of the pro-corporate, pro-military mainstream of Clintonism.

And to head his economic team, he chose Jason Furman–best known to labor activists for writing a 2005 article defending Wal-Mart as a “progressive success story” and denouncing the efforts of union-backed groups like Wal-Mart Watch to expose the retail giant.

Furman’s appointment was consistent with a series of right turns by Obama. The day after he claimed victory following the last Democratic primaries on June 3, Obama appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, where he committed himself to an undivided Jerusalem, which isn’t even the position of the Bush administration. At a Father’s Day speech, he renewed his blame-the-victim criticisms of Black men as being responsible for the problems of the Black community.

Of course, it’s the common wisdom of Democratic Party leaders that their presidential candidate needs to move toward the “center” as a general election gets underway. But Obama–who did say, once upon a time, that he would be a different kind of Democrat–is seeming more and more like a car whose steering wheel is stuck in one direction: turning right.

Obama’s latest lurch came after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its 5-4 decision barring executions of those convicted of child rape. Obama criticized the ruling–which meant lining up with the right-wing extremist wing of the court: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

On the issue of the death penalty, Obama likes to associate himself with the Illinois moratorium on executions declared by former Gov. George Ryan while Obama was still a state senator. At one Democratic debate, for instance, he talked about the “broken system” that “had sent 13 innocent men to death row.”

There is no reason to believe that the justice system is any less broken when it comes to crimes other than murder–and Obama knows it. But he and his advisers apparently thought it was more strategic to sign up with the absurd attack on the Supreme Court for committing “abuse of judicial authority,” in the words of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

The choice of Furman to lead his economic team underlines just how far Obama is from the progressive icon his supporters believe him to be.

Furman is a protégé of Robert Rubin, the Wall Street banker who shaped Clintonomics in the 1990s to serve the pro-business, neoliberal agenda.

In 2006, Furman was selected to head the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, a think tank founded by Rubin to press for free trade and balanced budget policies. On the advisory council of the Hamilton Project are Rubin and fellow Citigroup executives, as well as prominent hedge fund bosses like Eric Mindich of Eton Park Capital Management and Thomas Steyer of Farallon Capital.

Obama was the keynote speaker at the ceremony launching the Hamilton Project. He praised its leaders for their willingness to “experiment with policies that weren’t necessarily partisan or ideological.”

No one would confuse Furman with a radical. In a Washington Post op-ed last year, he argued for a decrease in the tax rate on corporations, provided loopholes in the tax code are closed. “We should consider,” he wrote, “tax reform in the classic 1986 mode”–that is, tax policy as defined under Ronald Reagan.

But Furman went above and beyond the call in a 2005 paper, titled “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story,” where he argued that the low-wage, no-benefit jobs created by the aggressively anti-union Wal-Mart were the price to pay so low-income Americans could have a place to buy goods at low prices.

As if the example set by Wal-Mart and emulated by other corporations wasn’t one of the main reasons why U.S. workers have to scramble to find bargain-basement prices. By Furman’s logic, every strike for better wages is a blow to the interests of the working class as a whole–and an injury to one must be a victory for all.

In a Slate.com debate about the tactics of groups organizing against Wal-Mart’s abuses of workers and customers alike, Furman clearly delighted in using the same smears against liberals employed by the likes of Karl Rove.

“The collateral damage from these efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits is way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing ‘Kum-Ba-Ya’ in the interests of progressive harmony,” Furman wrote.

Furman isn’t the exception, but the rule on a team of economic advisers to Obama that comes from, as author Naomi Klein puts it, “the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right.”

For example, there’s Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago economics department–though he’s better known these days for having met with Canadian government officials to assure them that the Obama campaign’s previous anti-NAFTA rhetoric “should be viewed as more political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

The UC economics department, of course, is notorious as the home of Milton Friedman and the high priests of neoliberalism and corporate globalization. Goolsbee comes from the Democratic wing of the department, but he still worships the free market, and expects the same of the presidential candidate he supports. “If you look at his platform, at his advisers, at his temperament,” Goolsbe said of Obama to one reporter, “the guy’s got a healthy respect for markets.”

As Klein pointed out in the Nation, the neoliberal dogmas of the “Chicago school” are increasingly discredited because of the damage they have caused–to the extent that “Friedman’s name is seen as a liability even at his own alma mater. So why has Obama chosen this moment, when all illusions of a consensus have dropped away, to go Chicago retro?”

The question is the answer. For all his talk about change, Obama is showing in such actions his commitment to an economic program that is acceptable to Wall Street and Corporate America.

Stephanie says she and her husband, a New Jersey transit worker, were bamboozled last year by a company called New Century Mortgage into refinancing their home loan with an adjustable rate mortgage that started at an interest rate of 11.3 percent and required a monthly payment of $2,900.

The Cannizzaros missed the last four months of payments, according to the Asbury Park Press, and face foreclosure. If they lose their home, Stephanie doesn’t know where she, her husband and their three teenage children will end up.

Angelo Mozilo is in trouble because of the mortgage crisis, too. Mozilo is CEO of Countrywide Financial, the country’s largest mortgage lender, which last week said it was tapping $11.5 billion in emergency loans from major banks, after revelations of a high delinquency rate among borrowers caused its usual sources of credit to dry up. An analyst at the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm said Countrywide could end up in bankruptcy.

But Angelo Mozilo won’t have to worry about the roof over his head. A Forbes magazine survey of executive pay ranks him seventh among CEOs of major U.S. corporations, with total compensation of $142 million for the year.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mozilo’s every need is taken care of by Countrywide–including $23,314 for automobile use and $24,076 for tax and investment advice in 2004. The $35,932 in country club fees that Countrywide picked up for Mozilo would have paid the Cannizzaros’ mortgage for all of 2007.

You’d think Mozilo might get canned for leading his company to the verge of collapse. But last year, it was announced that Mozilo would be paid $10 million for not retiring until 2009–on top of his annual salary, bonuses and stock options. If he does have to clean out his desk, though, Mozilo no doubt has a different scheme ready–under a golden parachute deal revealed by the company last year, he would have gotten $88 million if he left the company by December 31.

These two stories show that the real victims of the U.S. economy’s spreading mortgage crisis aren’t panicked investors or Wall Street banks–and especially not the loan sharks at Countrywide or New Century or the other mortgage companies that got rich off the housing boom.

The real victims–whether they lose their homes, or if they’re “only” forced to pay for the crisis through a variety of economic consequences, including a looming recession–are working people.

Two years ago, the Economist magazine called the worldwide real estate boom the “biggest bubble in history.”

“That bubble is now deflating, and it is having an enormous impact on the banking institutions that financed that bubble and, by extension, on the stock market,” says Joel Geier in an interview in the new issue of the International Socialist Review. “Every day, another shoe drops–another mortgage lender, hedge fund or bank goes out of business or announces that it is in trouble.”

When housing prices started falling earlier this year, gloomy commentators thought the main trouble would at least be confined to mortgage companies that specialized in so-called “sub-prime” loans–made to borrowers with little or no credit history, in return for all sorts of fees and variable interest rates that cause repayments to balloon over time.

But what emerged this summer is that the mortgage mess extends beyond predatory sub-prime lenders. Many of the biggest names in international finance are admitting their “exposure” to bad loans–and not just mortgages, but corporate debt, too.

Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and many more were part of a boom in arcane financial investments known as derivatives, which packaged together thousands of loans in giant bonds, to be bought and sold by the biggest investors. These bonds are spreading the sub-prime damage far and wide. For certain of these mortgage-backed bonds, banks can literally find no buyers at any price.

Because of the uncertainty about how many bad loans are out there, banks and other financial institutions are tightening requirements for even reliable customers–causing what’s known as a credit crunch.

The end of the housing boom was already having an impact on companies directly related to real estate and construction, but the drying up of credit could spread the contraction to other sectors of the economy, and quickly–leading to recession.

Only a few weeks ago, the International Monetary Fund announced it was raising its outlook for the global economy, predicting that any slowdown in the U.S. would be offset by rapid expansion in China and India, and an upswing in Japan and Europe.

But this month’s panic on the financial markets indicates that the opposite could be taking place–the crisis set off by the U.S. mortgage mess causing a generalized credit crunch that chokes off economic growth worldwide.

Whatever happens next, this much is certain–the threat of recession comes after a period of economic expansion in which U.S. workers’ living standards nevertheless stagnated or declined.

Even after the last recession officially ended in 2001, median household income (adjusted for inflation) continued dropping, ending almost 4 percent lower in 2004 than five years before. Individual states in the industrial Midwest suffered depression-like declines amid the “boom.” In Michigan, real household income dropped by 18 percent between 1999 and 2004.

Now, without even having made up lost ground from the last recession, U.S. workers face the possibility that the bottom will fall out again. The first signs this time won’t be job losses–but home foreclosures. And they will happen this time after Congress did Corporate America’s bidding and passed a bankruptcy bill that makes overwhelming debt a life sentence.

The business world’s first line of defense has become clear. The fault, it says, lies with the people defaulting on their mortgages. They bit off more than they can chew with their new homes, and now–regrettably–they’re paying the price.

Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani summarized the reasoning in his bold plea on a CNBC business talk show for “no government bailouts” of borrowers. “This is something that the market has to straighten out,” he lectured.

The short answer to such claims is that Wall Street is blaming the victim–this tactic having served its friends in politics, like Giuliani, so well over the years.

The longer answer is that they get the story exactly backward. The housing boom and mortgage mania were driven by the big-money interests with so much to gain from them. Their enthusiasm for super-profits drew ordinary people into the maw, not the other way around.

The final inflating of the housing bubble was set in motion at the beginning of the decade by the U.S. government’s monetary policy, engineered by Alan Greenspan. As Federal Reserve chief, Greenspan pushed interest rates to rock-bottom lows to offset the global economic slowdown caused by the Asian economic collapse in the late 1990s–and, subsequently, when the U.S. dot-com boom went bust. Real estate took off, and so did the mortgage industry.

At the same time, the phenomenon of “structured finance”–the alphabet soup of mind-numbingly complicated investments, based on packaging mortgage and other debt as securities to be bought and sold–was becoming popular on Wall Street.

Faced with lackluster returns on investments in the “real” economy, cash-rich mutual funds and other big players pressured banks for more high-yielding mortgage-based securities, and banks in turned pushed the mortgage companies’ mania for financing and refinancing loans, on whatever terms would draw in new customers.

Credit agencies–the supposed watchdogs of the financial world–acted as accomplices by assigning ratings to the mortgage-based investments that masked the risk of their sub-prime component. Bond issues based in significant part on sub-prime loans managed to get a AAA rating, suggesting that investing in them were as risk-free as buying U.S. Treasury bonds.

“Had the securities initially received the risky ratings that some of them now carry,” the Wall Street Journal reported last week, “many pension and mutual funds would have been barred by their own rules from buying them. Hedge funds and other sophisticated investors might have treated them more cautiously. And some mortgage lenders might have pulled back from making the loans in the first place, without such a ready secondary market for them.”

In other words, the mortgage mess was created, promoted and proliferated by Wall Street. Which is why it’s frustrating that mainstream proposals to deal with the crisis put business interests first.

The proposals of Democratic politicians–though they say they want to protect homeowners threatened with foreclosure–will do little more than bail out the banks and speculators whose greed caused the problems in the first place.

A real solution to this crisis would require major government action. For one thing, the bankruptcy bill should be repealed immediately. The Feds could take over the mortgage companies and expropriate the assets of any of the crooks associated with them. Mortgages that were packaged together in bonds for the speculators to gamble on could be taken over, too, and the loans renegotiated on generous terms.

But in America today, the profits of a hedge fund come before the homes of working people.

What kind of society sets such immense financial obstacles in the way of people guaranteeing one of the most basic necessities of life–a roof over their head? As this crisis plays out, millions more people–in the U.S. and around the world–will be asking that question.