Former Obama undersecretary of state Rick Stengel is freaking out over news that the Trump administration has taken a 10 percent equity stake in chip manufacturer Intel:
Trump’s strong-arming Intel for gov’t equity is something Mao and Stalin would be proud of. . . . Once, the GOP believed in laissez-faire capitalism and government not interfering in the private sector. Look it up: the state owning the means of production is called Marxism.
Anyone old enough to remember the phrase “Government Motors” should be able to appreciate what a wild line of criticism this is to hear from a former Obama official. As part of his Troubled Asset Relief Program, Barack Obama took for the US government a 61 percent equity stake in General Motors — and the Right’s backlash was entirely predictable. Rush Limbaugh called this “a sterling example of the Left’s crusade for government control of business” that proved “the Left’s enchantment with socialism.” John Stossel complained that this was a “move towards more government control of the economy. . . . And, in the end, that’s pretty close to socialism.”
That so many liberals have adopted this line of criticism — Joe Scarborough took it up on Thursday and Democratic consultant Jessica Tarlov ran with it on Friday, for example — should probably provoke some reflection among socialists who think of liberals as fellow travelers. While socialists may share certain egalitarian values and other priorities with contemporary Democrats, American liberals are still reflexively ambivalent-to-hostile toward the basic socialist agenda of nationalization. They will opportunistically support it when it is time for Democrats to bail out the economy, but then they will aggressively attack it…
Auteur: Carl Beijer
