While I do not support the means of Luigi Mangione – alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson – I fully back his purported goal of highlighting the greed, insensitivity, and inhumanity of large corporations and the increasing power of the oligarchs who control the country. He has hit the raw nerve of the vast majority of U.S. residents who consider the current economic system to be unfair and rigged against them.

While economic disparities plague all of the nations across the planet, nowhere among the richer nations in the world are these disparities more extreme than in the United States. The top 1% of the population has greater wealth – with an average income of $1,316,985 – than the entire bottom 99%, with an average income of $50,107.

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So, when is enough enough?

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Is it when the compensation of corporate CEOs has risen an astounding 300 times more than a typical worker?

Or when corporate profits have reached unprecedented heights, though the wages and benefits of the vast majority of workers either stagnated or diminished when accounting for inflation?

Is it when a few individual families own 20 or 30 or 40 fast food franchises while paying their workers less than a living wage, even though 26% of fast food employees are parents raising children, and 68% are the major wage earners for their families.

Or when many of our people go hungry as Congress fights to eliminate the food stamp safety net?

Is it when a McDonald’s employee must work the equivalent of at least 930 years to match the salary the CEO makes in a single year?

Or when a family purchases two or three or four or five or even six homes that they occasionally visit depending on their current mood the way the rest of us choose a pair of underwear, all while many of our people, including youth, go homeless?

Or is it when our elected officials in Washington, DC, respond to the demands of the upper-income groups and discount lower socioeconomic income brackets? Is that finally enough?

How about when the corporate sector increasingly dictates economic policy through the purchasing and ownership of politicians at the expense of the American people, creating a culture that eliminates workers’ health care and collective bargaining rights, promotes and maintains workplace inequalities, forecloses our homes through scurrilous business practices, and holds students hostage to loan structures that jeopardize their futures?

Or when the military-industrial complex marches to the beat of industry, our educational system bases itself on standardization and allegiance to corporate needs, and our prison industrial complex perpetuates the racial and socioeconomic class inequities pervasive throughout?

Is enough enough when corporations grab government bailouts with impunity while doling out exorbitant bonuses for executives? What about when these same executives pay lower tax rates than their secretaries?

When is enough enough?

A democratic socialist revolution

Even before the Cold War and the so-called “McCarthy Period” (named after former Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy (R) ), individuals and groups on the political and theocratic right have flung the term “socialist” from their metaphoric sling shots into the faces of their political opponents to discredit their characters and dismiss their ideas and policies, all with the goal of swaying the electorate toward a conservative agenda.

In his second State of the Union Address in January 2019, Donald Trump set a major theme for his future presidential bids by throwing to his base the red meat of socialism, characterizing it as an anti-American, freedom-killing political philosophy.

“Here, in the United States,” Trump said, “we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country… Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

The right continued to sound these socialist alarm bells, especially through the MAGA movement’s representation of Kamala Harris’s candidacy, plus its claim that various other Democratic politicians were “socialist left-wing radicals.”

The right would have us believe that socialism is destructive and freedom-killing, but according to the dictionary says socialism involves “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole,” where each of us has a stake and advances in the success of our collective economy.

Maybe if more of us challenged the widening and inhumane inequities in our nation, if each of us understood that we all have a stake in the success of our collective economy, then enough would definitely be enough.

So what are some strategies to narrow the gaps in wealth and income between the economic classes in the United States?

·       A quality, single-payer universal health care system that is not tied to an individual’s employment, which includes safe and reasonably priced prescriptions and over-the-counter drug therapies.

·       Guaranteed protection and enhancement of our Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid safety nets that are not taxed

·       A system of parental leave, paid sick leave, tax credits and governmental supplements for quality child day care services, as well as universal Pre-K education for all young people.

·       Guaranteed equal pay for equal work between the sexes, and the raising of the minimum wage so workers can significantly raise their standard of living.

·       Further nationalization of our parks, forests, mountains, rivers, streams, shores, and off-shore waters, rather than allocating increased corporate mining, drilling, and timber rights.

·       Free and quality education, not only through grade 12, but also throughout higher education and even after for everyone who desires.

·       government-sponsored programs that guarantee our seniors a retirement system that ensures a high quality of life free from economic burdens.

·       Guaranteed rights of workers in all industries to organize and collectively bargain for better wages and working conditions.

·       Elimination of workplace and larger societal inequalities based on race, nationality, citizenship status, age, sex, sexual identity, gender identity and expression, disability, socioeconomic standing, religion, and other social identities.

·       Guaranteed comfortable and secure places to live, and governmental policies that actually prevent a banking system that forecloses people’s homes through shady business practices.

·       Severe restrictions on the political process to prevent mammoth contributions by individuals and corporations, who currently have the power to buy and own politicians and influence public policy while locking out individuals and groups that are unable to amass large political funds.

·       Challenge the military industrial complex that marches to the beat of industry, and the prison industrial complex that perpetuates the racial and socioeconomic class inequities pervasive throughout society.

·      Create a true progressive tax structure where everyone pays their fair share, one that inhibits massive inequities caused by the overwhelming accumulation of wealth by the top income brackets.

·       Establish effective restrictions on the so-called “free market” economic system that enables the creation and enhancement of mega monopolies, outsourcing of jobs, manufacture of defective products, and inhibition in the development of clean renewable energy technologies.

If the United States does not act to narrow the massive gaps in wealth and income between sectors of the population, I believe a class war – hopefully non-violent – is imminent.

Ironically, it will take a democratic socialist revolution to prevent the current capitalist system – lacking in oversight regulations and rife with corruption and massive wealth and income inequities – from imploding onto itself.

It will take a democratic socialist revolution to promote governmental sponsorship of previously private and semi-private sector institutions, such as insurance and retirement policy corporations and educational establishments.

It will take a democratic socialist revolution to compel the United States to live up to its overriding promise that anyone can succeed depending on their motivation, merit, and talent – neither helped nor hindered by their socioeconomic birth ranking or their social identities.

It will take a democratic socialist revolution to ensure a firm and strong safety net to catch everyone who has, for any reason, been unable to ascend.

No, democratic socialism is not a magic panacea or some unattainable utopian vision from a futuristic film. Instead, democratic socialism provides a concrete foundation of action to lift our nation from the ever-widening social and economic abyss in which we find ourselves, an abyss that poses an existential crisis far greater than any threat from foreign military or cyber invasion.

Young people, especially those steeped in history – or possibly protected from its murky shadows – can educate their elders who grew up in earlier generations when “socialist” was thrown around as an evil and corrosive epithet.

The type of democratic socialism proposed, for example, by Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) – and while not referring to herself as a democratic socialst, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has articulated similar plans) – is completely dissimilar from the freedom-killing national socialism ruthlessly imposed by the Nazis; from the governmental system inflicted within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR); or the ruthless socialism of Venezuela and the communism of Mainland China and North Korea.

Rather, the democratic socialism outlined by Sanders and the movement he has spawned resembles more the social and economic systems of the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.

No country in the world today stands as a fully socialist state, but rather, some of the most successful economies combine elements of capitalism with socialism to create greater degrees of equity and lesser disparities between the rich, the poor, and those on the continuum in between.

This year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conducted its Better Life Index to determine the happiest countries in the world, according to its residents. Based on an 11-measure survey assessing quality of life, including housing, income, jobs, community, education, the environment, health, work-life balance, and life satisfaction, all of the Scandinavian countries, ranked in the top 10.

Number one is Finland, followed by Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Canada, (which provides a single-payer health care system, unlike its North American neighbor), New Zealand, Sweden, and Australia (which places severe restrictions on firearms ownership).  

The United States did came in at 17 (down two from the previous year). Therefore, we might do well to look to these countries for some of their socialist policies that sustain high qualities-of-life for their residents. 

Many on the political right have established the false binary of capitalism on one side and socialism/communism on the other. But when we get beyond the fear and false generalizations, byeond the connections to tyrannical corrupt dictatorships, is socialism really so “anti-American”?

It will take more than a president to do this, though. It will take the houses of Congress to propose and pass legislation and the courts to maintain policies and regulations making the capitalist system more equitable and sustainable. It will also require Congress to conduct genuine oversight functions that prior Congresses relinquished.

Yes, it will take a democratic socialist revolution to save capitalism from itself.

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