One of the great unknowns in the 2020 election is the surprising shift of many young voters and Democrats toward a socialist agenda. It is still not clear if the majority of the country is ready for such a shift though polls show growing support for socialist policies. Not to be outdone, Candi CdeBaca won a runoff race last week against former Denver city council president Albus Brooks by pledging that she would implement not socialist, but virtually communist policies “by any means necessary.”
CdeBaca insists that we are now in “late phase capitalism” and that we are ready to move to “community ownership” of land and resources. Indeed, in the video from a “Denver Decides” candidate forum, CdeBaca seemed to be reading directly from Das Capital:
“I don’t believe our current economic system actually works. Um, capitalism by design is extractive and in order to generate profit in a capitalist system, something has to be exploited, that’s land, labor or resources. And I think that we’re in late phase capitalism and we know it doesn’t work and we have to move into something new, and I believe in community ownership of land, labor, resources and distribution of those resources. And whatever that morphs into is I think what will serve community the best and I’m excited to usher it in by any means necessary.”
What is astonishing is that, with failures of socialist and communist systems around the world, Democratic candidates are touting the superiority of such centralized economies over capitalism. A Harris poll found 55 percent of Americans would prefer to live in a socialist country. As with the popularity of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the victory in Denver shows just how far apart the extremes of American politics has become.
Jean L.,
As I understand subsequent comments, you were in error in comparing this Denver idiot to Pol Pot/ Kmher Rouge.
Pol Pot is dead; is there still a Kmher Rouge organization you can apologize to for saying they’re like this moron in Denver?
Yes. Hun Sen was one of Pol Pot’s upper cadres. Today he remains the long serving chief executive of Cambodia. However, his party is a post socialist Cambodia People’s party, not the Khmer Rouge that were removed and suppressed by the Vietnamese who invaded in 79 and took them out. Hun Sen had fled to Vietnam in 77 during a big purge and became the new leader after their successful invasion.
That’s the thing about leftist purges. They usually antagonize someone who’s smarter than the purgers and comes back with a vengeance. Remember that, leftist nutjobs
I remember the first time I spent time in southern Florida, in Tampa, when I ran across the difference between free-speech laws, and those of what some would like to be in the United States. Some scummy, nasty, jerk was hanging out in the waterfront bar I was at, wearing a swastika.
Canadian laws do not permit the presentation of such a display, and I was offended, and more so when I approached this individual to speak to him about it.
What he had to say was grossly offensive, both to me as a Canadian, and as avn individual who respects human rights. I eventually walked away from him, and by the end of the night, he had left, ending what could have been an unpleasant confrontation.
The antidote to offensive speech is more speech, not draconian anti speech laws by a tyrannical government.
CdeBaca:
So did the Khmer Rouge.
“Community ownership of land” translates to “We own your home and any other land you possess.
“Community ownership of labor” means “You must work for us whether you choose to or not.” “Community ownership of resources” means “we control your use of electricity, water and any other resource we covet”.
“Community distribution of these resources” means “we will give your real property, your labor and resources to whomever we wish”.
CdeBaca’s platform is virtually indistinguishable from that of the Khmer Rouge.
Comparing a Democratic city council candidate in Denver to the genocidal psychopath Pol Pot is a preposterously hyperbolic claim with no relationship to reality. Pol Pot used the Khmer Rouge to create an “agricultural utopia” with no money and hundreds of thousands of people in farming communes. He didn’t allow religion, didn’t allow ownership of private property and straight up executed intellectuals for being the enemy of the state. Not even with guns usually, but with god damn clubs and pickaxes, so he could save bullets. He was like Mao on steroids and possibly even worse, because he had a strangle hold on a tiny country that the rest of the world just ignored. Can you please direct me to the quote where Candi CdeBaca called for the genocide of Denver residents who refuse to give up their property to the state government? I must have missed it somewhere, maybe she said it real fast in the video and I didn’t catch it.
Also, how are you even coming up with the idea that some low-level city council candidate can start causing genocide and suffering in our country in 2019? Are you that paranoid and afraid of liberal Latino women? Sure, that’s fair if you think her policies are disastrous and don’t want someone like that in government. That’s a legitimate perspective to have. But you’re still going to compare her to a monster that systematically murdered his own people in one of the most brutally horrific events in the entire 20th century. And somehow you actually believes that socialism could lead to this in the U.S.? Even if we elected a socialist president, we’re a two party nation and I find it highly unlikely that socialist policies would become the law of the land unless the Democrats take over the House and the Senate and somehow re-write all rules in order to consolidate their power. I can’t see this country ever becoming fully socialist.
Maybe you should look up the Khmer Rouge and learn more about what they really did, since you think their platform is virtually indistinguishable from Cdebaca’s. Someday, I’m hoping I can travel to Cambodia some time to see the Killing Fields and learn more about the horrors that took place there. It pisses me off to no end when people demonize their opponents by comparing them with the worst examples humanity has to offer. Read a book or an scholastic journal before you make a completely outlandish comparison. The U.S. government of the 2010’s and the Cambodian sham government of the 1970’s are nothing alike.
Jamesjim… the killing fields is not a nice site as you walk over the bones of the dead within the low fences that surround those areas. The skulls aren’t pretty either nor are the rags saved of those killed. Knowledge of the history actually tells one more than being there and one can get that history from a survivor who might be your translator and won’t accompany you to walk on the bones of his relatives.
How did that come to be? The same way it came in Russia and China where the slaughter was tremendous. All of these places have in common thoughts such as those represented by the platforms of the extreme left that might not be all that disimilar to the platform of CdeBaca’s. (I don’t know his exact platform.) Yesterday we saw an example of of physical violence against an individual, Andy Ngo, by antifa who call themselves anti-fascists but are the closest to the violent fascists that took over control in the countries previously mentioned. Andy Ngo was beaten so hard that he was hospitalized with a bleed in his brain while the police of Portland did nothing. He was attacked with all sorts of projectiles including “milkshakes”, fast drying cement. Don’t think the violence of the left only exists in the countries mentioned. It exists here in this country only restrained by people that still recognize the difference between freedom and slavery.
I think you are spreading it a little thick. I mean you do enjoy those public lands you hike on that we all communally own. Remember too, we have the lowest unemployment of the nation yet our streets are full of homeless and Denver’s schools have extremely high rates of people performing way below grade level. Record numbers of suicide and drug overdose, all those indicators of a people in despair. She beat a developer who was into gentrification, good. Now she can try to fix the many problems Denver faces. They better do something before it’s “up against the wall”.
For a more nuanced view of Candi CdeBaca there was a pretty good write up in Westword. https://www.westword.com/news/candi-cdebaca-on-historic-denver-city-council-win-michael-hancock-11375359
In the American constitutional environment of freedom and free enterprise, you and your comrades may open and operate a charity or multiple charities in the free markets of the private sector.
You cannot, however, tax citizens for the purposes of redistributing wealth. Congress has the power to tax merely for “…general Welfare…,” omitting and, thereby, excluding any power to tax for “individual welfare.”
Also, the right to private property bears on the possession and disposition of or the claim to and exercise of dominion over said private property. Congress may not legislate away the possession or disposition of any individual’s private property.
James Madison defined private property as “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”
I read the article. For those who have not lived in Denver within the past two decades, Westword is an “alternative weekly” with the pages of classified devoted to escort services and similar things one expects from that sort of publication, and the author,of the article, Michael Roberts, began at Westword as a music editor and media columnist before moving to a broader beat.
Roberts begins the article this way:
and avoids mentioning what CdeBaca about capitalism and how all property ought to be communally owned completely.
Roberts’s article wasn’t nuanced at all. It was a canonization piece that abdicated the journalist’s responsibility to remain objective and to not withhold information which reasonable people might find concerning – such as a candidate for city council who thinks that land and resources ought to be communally owned. Roberts failed his readers entirely.
somsai – do you believe he was talking about expanding the national park system?
Most of the homeless, at least according to Los Angeles statistics, are drug addicts and/or mentally ill. The job market is not the driver. Those who have been priced out of the housing markets do not, for example, defecate in the potted plants in front of a restaurant or leave used condoms on the sidewalk. Those who just need help are the low hanging fruit to help. So easy. Trying to help a drug addict or mentally ill person is rather difficult.
This is why I’m on the fence about legalizing drugs. For one, I don’t see how the FDA could remain in existence. For another, we have hordes of Walking Dead drug addicts lurching around California. They camp in ephemeral stream beds, where their copious amounts of garbage, human waste, and dirty needles, wash down to the beaches during the short rainy season. Meanwhile, politicians claim it’s shopping bags and straws that are pollution existential crisis, not the homeless who are so out of their heads they are throwing bags, straws, and everything else on the ground all around them.
Socialism would not cure homelessness, because they are on the street due to drug addiction or mental illness. All it would do would be to impoverish more people.
Denver isn’t the only school performing below grade level. The public school system is a joke. I have not been enamored of the result of state controlled education, as well as the repeated efforts of the teachers unions to combat school choice. They successfully got legislation passed that required private schools and charters to comply with Common Core, which parents hate. The math instruction is sub par and full of gimmicks. Unless you teach them real math after school, they won’t know how to do it by the end of the year.
If you don’t like the performance of state controlled public education, why put the State in control of even more?
somsai. which party has run Denver for three decades? Students performing way below grade level are whose fault? Maybe the treachers’ unions? Streets so full of homeless that when the 2008 Democratic Convention was held, old schools were opened to get the beggars off every street corner and Interstate highway ramp before the news people came?
The many problems Denver faces are not the fault of capitalism failing, but socialism’s unintended consequences.
I meant to ask if “Students performing way below grade level are whose fault” was perhaps the teachers’ unions. I have seen teachers’ unions at work elsewhere. Treachery is a round-about way of describing what they do. In their big push for increased teacher salaries and exclusive rights to collectively bargain for teachers in the 1980s, they said that if a foreign country had been responsible for the decline in students’ academic performance, we’d have to declare war on that country.
The teachers’ unions got those pay raises, not a little of which are assessed in union dues. The AFT and NEA leadership have bragged publicly since then that they are a power in Democratic politics through donations taken from teacher salaries. Meanwhile, student academic performance has no just continued to fall since the 1980s but plummeted in almost all public schools.
We should hold the Democratic Party and teachers’ unions to their propaganda of the 1980s, and declare war on them for destroying our students’ academic performance in ways that go beyond nonfeasance to malfeasance. We know where to have the Air Force and Navy deliver our response to those acts, for teachers’ unions are lavishly domiciled at the state and federal levels.