I wrote most of this essay on the day (12/29/2019) of the last Loop Trolley ride. For those outside of St. Louis, the Delmar Loop is a famous cultural street, connecting University City with the City of St. Louis proper. Revitalized in the late twentieth century primarily by local entrepreneur Joe Edwards, it was voted one of ten “Great Streets in America” by the American Planning Association in 2007.

And the Trolley? Well, the Trolley is, or was…. not so Great. It cost over $50 million, of which around $30 million came from federal grants, $4 million came from City tax abatements, and $3 million from the County; its construction caused nightmarish traffic in the Loop, stagnating commerce in the area; and it didn’t really do anything, other than provide a shuttle from the Missouri History Museum to the Loop, which is kind of cool, I guess. The whole thing endured for about a year. Now it’s dead.

In a political ideologies class in my undergraduate degree, I read an essay that so stuck with me that the closing of the Loop Trolley provided an instant connection to it in my mind. Titled “Town Meetings & Workers’ Control: A Story For Socialists” and written by political theorist Michael Walzer in 1978, it is a parable about a man who builds a town, and echoes the present situation of St. Louis governance pretty strongly.

This fictional entrepreneurial fellow, J.J., who, “when the frontier was still somewhere east of the Great Plains…set out to make his fortune.” First, J.J. establishes a ferry at the bend of a river (not unlike St. Louis itself). Taking pioneers from one bank to the other earns him some wealth. He buys up some land in the area and, when settlers arrive, lends them the acres needed to build a church, a blacksmith, and the other necessities of an American frontier town. When Indians attack (a somewhat problematic use of language and example on Walzer’s part), J.J. orders the rifles and gear needed to fend them off. In this way he becomes the informal mayor. When he borrows money from a bank and builds the town hall, he formalizes this role. What was previously a functional economic arrangement becomes a formal political one.

J-town, as the settlement becomes known, prospers. J.J. is the default leader, though “the settlers were not surprised; neither was there any opposition. J.J. was still a gregarious man; he knew them all, talked to them all, always consulted with them about matters of common interest.” J.J. built the town; that he would own it made a sort of sense. Years pass.

Growth requires a degree of formalization, and an elderly J.J. is obliged to appoint other town officers. In an act of hubris, he makes his idiot son chief of police. It is at this point that the citizens stage an electoral revolt. Here’s the crux of the arguments: J.J. is appreciated by all for his leadership of the early town. But this role only entitles him to “honor and glory, but not to obedience.” The citizens are workers, after all. They were the ones who built and operated the business J.J. arranged, and more to the point, his poor governance impacts their lives. The revolt is successful, and the town moves from informal and lax capitalist dictatorship to formalized workers’ democracy. The moral of the parable, writes Walzer, is that “what touches all should be decided by all”. If it will impact you, you should have a say in it. This could be the thesis statement of the entire socialist movement.

Back to St. Louis, with apologies for the diversion. Joe Edwards is our own local J.J. He is widely recognized and positively acknowledged as the man who built the Loop via his ownership and/or support of fruitful businesses like Blueberry Hill. St. Louis Magazine even called him the “Duke of Delmar”. But not all of his ideas have been so brilliant. Edwards has long been a supporter of installing the trolley system in the Loop. Whether or not such a plan could have been viable, its real-world implementation was not, costing taxpayers millions and providing neither increased tourism nor much of a public good.

Joe isn’t alone in St. Louis-area publicly-funded foibles. Consider, for instance, the public opposition to a Major League Soccer stadium over the past few years, which would have involved tens of millions of dollars in public funds. When the proposal was defeated, the organizers began a plan to create a stadium without spending state and local treasure. And a more recent example, the proposed privatization of Lambert International Airport, was defeated by local groups like Don’t Sell Our Airport and the St. Louis Democratic Socialists of America chapter. One might point to these as examples of the system working: A public vote defeated the MLS stadium proposal, and public opposition defeated the airport privatization plan, led by multimillionaire Republican investor Rex Sinquefield, a man with all Joe Edwards’ defects and none of his virtues. But the system clearly didn’t stop the Loop Trolley, and we’re all poorer and worse off for it.

My opposition to these projects doesn’t come from the fiscal conservative’s impulse to save money in the public treasury. Rather, I use the leftist’s critique that instead of playgrounds and attractions for the professional managerial classes, the money should be spent on social services, the homeless, jobs programs, desperately-needed police reform, and greening the city. I think much of the electorate knows this. Imagine if their representatives on the Board of Alderman and the local Democratic Party weren’t mostly weak shills for property developers and investors. Better yet, imagine if the electorate could determine where the money went themselves. Imagine, in short, a community where what touches all is decided by all.

P.S. The Trolley broke down on its final ride in front of Joe Edwards’ Peacock Loop Diner. On a thematically-related note, when Edwards rolled out plans for the diner in 2013, he said he chose the name because “everybody likes [peacocks]—I don’t think anyone has a bad thing to say about a peacock.” Amazing.

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Jeremy Corbyn, elected by a landslide to lead Britain’s Labour Party, has for his entire 32 years in politics held fast to the socialist ideals of old Labour. His humane platform spoke to a country weary of the neoliberal policies of Britain’s “New Labour Party,” the party of corporatists Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. In a reaction to those policies, the party elected Corbyn, the most left-wing leader in its history. Corbyn was a 200-1 outsider when the three-month contest began, but he won with 60% of the vote, trouncing his three rivals.

The New Labour Party is similar to our Democratic Party in that it rejected its socialist, trade union roots in favor of serving corporate and bank interests. Under both parties, citizens have experienced destroyed social protections, gutted industries, financial deregulation, the off-shoring of good jobs, the destruction of trade unions, speculative bubbles, the encouragement of consumption on credit, the privatization of public assets, the impoverishment of workers and the middle class, and escalating income and wealth inequality.

The BBC reported on Corbyn’s victory in the UK, which represents a stunning rebuke of Labour’s corporate/bank driven policies:

The left-winger, who has spent his entire 32-year career in the Commons on the backbenches, promised to fight for a more tolerant and inclusive Britain—and to tackle “grotesque levels of inequality in our society”.

He said the leadership campaign “showed our party and our movement, passionate, democratic, diverse, united and absolutely determined in our quest for a decent and better society that is possible for all”.

“They are fed up with the inequality, the injustice, the unnecessary poverty. All those issues have brought people in, in a spirit of hope and optimism.”

Corbyn’s courage, integrity and consistency over the years won him the confidence of an electorate suffering from austerity measures enacted to preserve the wealth of the elite. The British get the connection between corporate owned political parties and economic inequality. Americans are beginning to get the message.

In his foreign policy, Corbyn has fearlessly confronted militarism in all forms. He has called out Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians, and questions the post cold war role of NATO, which has expanded its powers to better serve corporate and banking interests.

Corbyn’s bold foreign policy

• Conduct negotiations with Hamas and Hezbollah
• Try Israel’s leaders for war crimes against the Palestinians
• Support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel.
• Stop arms sales to Israel
• Scrap Britain’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (similar to the U.S. Patriot Act)
• Have a serious debate about the powers of NATO, its need for democratic accountability, and its questionable global expansion
• Enact unilateral nuclear disarmament and eliminate UK’s nuclear weapons system.
• Oppose British military intervention in Syria
• Demand Saudi Arabia stop funding and supporting the Islamic State.
• Hold talks with the leaders of warring factions in Iraq and Afghanistan to end the conflicts.

Corbyn on the necessity to unravel imperialist wars in the middle east:

There is no solution to the killing and abuse of human rights that involves yet more Western military action. Ultimately there has to be a political solution in the region which bombing by NATO forces cannot bring about.

The drama of the killings and advances by Isis in the past few weeks is yet another result of the Bush-Blair war on terror since 2001.

The victims of these wars are the refugees and those driven from their homes and the thousands of unknown civilians who have died and will continue to die in the region.

The “winners” are inevitably the arms manufacturers and those who gain from the natural resources of the region.

Corbyn’s domestic policy, more bold than Bernie’s

• Significantly increase taxes on the wealthy
• End unfair corporate tax breaks
• Cap wages for corporate executives to fight “grotesque levels of inequality”
• Enact widespread rent control to stop “social cleansing” caused by gentrification
• Enact “quantitative easing for people” by investing in housing, energy and other infrastructure projects
• Create a new national investment bank to encourage growth and reduce the deficit.
• Create a sanctuary in the Antarctic to prevent mining and oil drilling
• End fracking
• Build renewable energy based on solar and wind
• Support “global regulation” to prevent the export of carbon products
• Stop attempts to privatize the universal health care system (the National Health Service)
• Abolish the British monarchy
• Nationalize energy companies
• Re-nationalize the post office and the rail service
• Create a National Education Service to provide free universal education—day care through university—to be funded by corporate taxation
• Abolish charter schools
• End the tax-exempt status of even the elite private schools.
• Bring back robust government funding for the arts
• Reverse government cuts that gutted the BBC
• Halt the government’s closure of domestic violence centers for women
• Fight discrimination against women in the workplace
• Strengthen laws against sexual harassment and sexual assault

John Halle at Counterpunch summed up Corbyn’s victory:

The 1% percent will use any means necessary to maintain their boots on our necks and their hands in our pockets.

If there’s any lesson which living history should have taught us, it’s that.

But the Corbyn victory is now one of many indications that we can fight back and win.

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Alexander Reed Kelly reports at Truthdig that France’s leftist President Francois Hollande announced a 75 percent tax on the personal incomes of anyone earning more than $1.3 million a year beginning in 2013. The increase will be effective for two years. France, the world’s fifth-largest economy, is trying to plug a “$48 billion hole in the budget” and raising revenue is a sensible place to start.

Of course, the top earners in France are freaking out warning that such a tax burden will kill businesses and drive the French equivalent of “job creators” elsewhere. And of course, they are voicing the old complaint that “it’s going to be very, very difficult to attract talent to work in France, almost impossible.”  Right.

The refrain has been heard virtually everywhere a tax increase has been proposed in the Western world in the last 50 years. In the United States, the marginal tax rate—the percentage taken from every dollar of personal income earned past a certain amount—reached 94 percent in 1944, and with the exception of a four-year period in the late 1940s, didn’t dip below 90 percent until Congress accepted President Kennedy’s tax reforms in the mid-1960s. Rates remained at or above 70 percent through the Carter administration, and after Ronald Reagan’s drastic reform program in the early ’80s, settled amid their current range in the 30th percentile in the early ’90s.

Kelly says Hollande’s administration will come up with other ways to support and retain businesses that provide French society with vital jobs, income and tax revenue. And, that may not be as hard as it sounds as moving large businesses out of France cannot be done overnight. After all, it took decades for American businesses to move offshore.

Hollande is forcing a test of the conventional wisdom that says high taxes on individuals and corporations drive societies toward financial ruin. The results of Hollande’s test could end up standing the assumptions, upon which a majority of modern economies are currently based, on their head. Of course, the shrill voices of doom forget that Norway, Sweden and Denmark have had very high taxes for decades and are doing just fine.

Hollande vows to fight for gays and women

On September 25, President Hollande delivered an historic speech before the UN General Assembly, calling on the body to reject the criminalization of homosexuality around the world.

Hollande has promised to pass a law in France permitting marriage of same sex persons in 2013, a proposal that, according to Capital.fr, is supported by the majority of the French people. He told those assembled that France would lead the way in an honorable fight for universal human freedoms:

This is why France will continue to carry out all these battles: the abolition of the death penalty, women’s rights to equality and dignity, and for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality that can not be recognized as a crime but as a recognition of [sexual] orientation.

He added:

All members countries have the obligation to guarantee the security of their citizens, and if one nation adheres to this obligation, it is then imperative that we, the United Nations, facilitate the necessary means to make that guarantee. These are the issues that France will lead and defend in the United Nations. I say this with seriousness. When there is paralysis . . . and inaction, then injustice and intolerance can find their place.

Who is Francois Hollande?

Francois Hollande was elected President of France on 6 May 2012, defeating the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. He is the second Socialist President of the Fifth French Republic, after François Mitterrand who served from 1981 to 1995. His policies include the following:

   Foreign policy: supports the withdrawal of French troops present in Afghanistan by the end of 2012.

   European politics: Proposes a closer Franco-German partnership.

   Financial system: backs the creation of a European rating agency and the separation of lending and investment in banks.

   Energy: endorses reducing the share of electricity generated by nuclear power in France from 75 to 50% in favor of renewable energy sources.

   Taxes: revenues above 1,000,000 euros per year to be taxed at a 75% rate (rates for part of the income below a million not changed).

   Education: supports the recruitment of 60,000 new teachers.

   Recruitment of 5,000 judges, police officers and gendarmes.

   Construction of 500,000 state ruled homes per year.

   Restoration of retirement (paid by the State) at age 60 for those who have contributed more than 41 years.

   Hollande supports same-sex marriage and adoption for LGBT couples, and has plans to pursue the issue in early 2013.

   The provision of development funds for deprived suburbs.

   Return to a deficit of 0% of GDP in 2017.

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Since Barack Obama first began trying to become the President of the United States, there have been those who called him a socialist. During the last GOP Presidential debate, we saw this label become the dominant theme of the GOP, which used to be labeled the “loyal opposition.” Claims of President Obama being a socialist seem to have little connection to reality and may end up having consequences that the GOP does not intend.

Accusations of President Obama being a socialist have been around from almost as soon as he first declared his interest in the Presidency. While he was not the first Democratic candidate to be labeled socialist, there was a difference. in that conservatives have a long history of labeling black leaders as “socialist” or “communist.” Jerry Falwell accused Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. of being a communist and felt he was a tool of the communist attempt to dominate the world. This notion is tied to much of the rhetoric we heard from Tea Party types who wanted “our country back.” The association comes from seeing any threat as coming from an alien source – and there is nothing more alien to Americans than socialism and communism. This combines with the difference in race to making the mental connection that black leaders who oppose the status quo are not good Americans, ergo they are socialists and communists.

The use of the words socialist and communist to denote a threat and to act as insults is a relatively new phenomenon in the US.  In the early 20^th century, major cities that had socialist mayors,  and many labor movements were propelled forward by the work of organizers who were also communists. Many know the story of Helen Keller learning the word “water,” but few are aware that she became one of the few women of her generation to get a college degree and spent much of her adulthood writing and working for socialist causes.

Many would be surprised to learn that the Republican Party itself was influenced by socialists at the time of its founding. Horace Greely employed Karl Marx as a foreign correspondent, and Abraham Lincoln employed Marx’s editor as a presidential assistant. Other Presidents who borrowed from the ideas of socialism include (but are not limited to) Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Socialism has a long and proud history in America, although there have been attempts to demonize it by those who fear losing power. Then there were those who used communism and socialism simply as a means to get elected and exercise power. I am not speaking of the socialists and communists themselves, but the Joe McCarthy’s who have used fear as a lever to access more power.

The use of the word “socialist” by conservatives is in the grand tradition of Joe McCarthy, but may end up having an unintended consequence. Many of America’s young people know very little about either socialism or communism, other than what they learn from the media. As they see that capitalism is running off of the rails, with job prospects for graduates still languishing, they hear that those proposing change and job programs are socialists. The conclusion is obvious, if capitalism is broken, and it takes socialism to get things moving – then by all means lets all become socialists!

Those old enough remember  may recall a skit by comedian Lenny Bruce, in which he proposed that a hateful word being used to disparage minorities begin to be used by everyone towards absolutely everyone. Before long, the word would lose all of its power to do harm to anyone. The GOP may very well be going down the path to making this strategy a reality. It has indeed been a while since we have seen so much discussion about socialism, and I can’t help but wonder whether more people are reading Das Kapital today than four years ago.

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It was offered to us to demonstrate that through cooperative efforts we can better the lot of our co-workers. We have also been given the privilege to show that where all personal gain and benefit is eliminated, greater good can be accomplished for the benefit of all. It remains too for the members of our Cooperative Community to exert their efforts to run this cooperative and make it more useful, and more interesting, for all who live in these apartments.

Abraham E. Kazan,
Founder, The Amalgamated Houses

A friend of mine, whose parents were progressive and whose grandparents were self-defined anarchists, grew up in the Amalgamated co-op in the Bronx. She has fond memories of growing up in a warm, close knit community where, in the summers, women played mahjong on card tables set up in the park across the street. She even remembers Abraham Kazan, whom everyone simply called “Kazan.” Her parents have passed away, but each year she goes back for a reunion with her childhood friends.

The Amalgamated Houses, the oldest non-profit housing cooperative in the country, has served four generations and is still going strong. A densely populated co-oopertive housing complex in the Bronx is the direct opposite of the single-family suburban home of the American Dream. So why does the Amalgamated have a 2 to 7 year waiting list? The answer is affordability, collective ownership and management, supportive community life, and protection from the precarious boom and bust of traditional real estate investment. For lower and middle income working families, it offers much more than just a place to live.

The following draws heavily from an excellent article on the Amalgamated by Alexandra Vozick Hans.

In the early 1900s, large numbers of immigrants moved into the Lower East Side of New York City, where they lived in squalid, overcrowded, walk up tenements, with no sunlight or ventilation. The majority were Jews who worked in clothing sweatshops under deplorable work conditions. During and after World War I housing was in short supply, so slumlords took advantage of their tenants and raised rents. In reaction to the abuses of landlords and bosses, they began to organize rent strikes and join unions, such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union.

Sidney Hillman (1887-1948), the visionary president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, believed that workers not only needed better working conditions, but better living conditions. To that end, he appointed the director of the Amalgamated Credit Union, Abraham Kazan (1889-1971) to come up with a plan to solve the housing shortage for these middle and low-income workers. Kazan, a Russian socialist and a progressive thinker, was committed to helping working families.

The birth of the non-profit housing co-operative

Kazan came up with the idea of a non-profit, co-operative, affordable housing. His concept was as follows:

• People would buy shares in the non-profit corporation that owned the housing, but not their individual apartments. They could not sell their shares on the open market; but members their shares would be repurchased by the co-op when they moved out for their original investment. The number of rooms of the apartment determined the share price. The initial per room outlay, plus a moderate monthly rent, known as a carrying charge, would finance the co-operative, and help to secure a mortgage.

• The co-op would be a non-discriminatory, democratically run organization, open to all people, not just union members. Each apartment had one vote. (Kazan’s original idea was to have an outside volunteer Board of Directors elected by the residents who would oversee the manager, but today the Board of Directors is made up entirely of in-house residents, or “co-operators.”)

• Continuing education would be key to making the experiment work. Kazan reasoned that, in order to be effective participants in the management of their co-operative housing, share holders had to be knowledgeable about economic and social issues to better assess the needs facing their tenant-owned and tenant run community.

Kazan’s vision, Amalgamated Houses, becomes a reality.

The Governor of New York State, Alfred E. Smith, who himself grew up on the Lower East Side, understood that something had to be done to ease the apartment shortage. He helped pass the Limited Dividend Housing Act of 1926, which encouraged the development of moderately priced, limited profit housing to be built by private developers who would receive, in turn, a 20-year real estate tax exemption. Kazan seized on this opportunity and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers acquired a mortgage and a tract of land in the Bronx. It was in a beautiful setting with trees and grass, far away from the squalor of the Lower East Side. The development was to become the Amalgamated Houses, which is now the oldest limited equity housing development in the United States. To help people buy their shares, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and The Jewish Daily Forward set up a credit fund with the Amalgamated Bank allowing them to borrow up to 50% of their down payments, which they could pay off over ten year’s time.

Co-operators, as residents were called, began moving into the first building of 300 apartments in November 1927. The building was designed in the Tudor style with courtyards that had gardens, fountains, trees and benches. The first building was a 4-floor walk-up divided up into approximately 26 entrances with 9-11 apartments per entrance. Each unit had 2 or 3 apartments per floor. The apartments had hardwood floors, ceramic tile bathrooms, an eat-in kitchen, a foyer, a living room and 1, 2 or 3 bedrooms. They all had cross ventilation and sunlight. A typical 2-bedroom apartment cost $2000 down and $44 per month rent, which included utilities.

Soon after the first building opened, the co-op created a grocery store for fruits and vegetables, a milk and ice delivery system, a pharmacy, a kosher butcher, a tailor, a barbershop, a shoe repair shop, and a tearoom. And, of course, there was a community library. The visionary founder Abraham Kazan encouraged residents to expand their horizons through reading and other forms of continuing education. Eventually, a branch of the Public Library was located in the Amalgamated. In 1933, the residents successfully petitioned the city for a local K-12 school, and the co-op’s Circle Pines Day Camp was established to keep children occupied in the summer months.

The education Kazan encouraged included exposure to the arts. So, the co-op had space for every kind of creative expressive activity: dance, music, art, pottery, theatre in Yiddish and English, woodworking, and photography. There were Sunday discussions and political debates. Eventually, another building was built with an auditorium for lectures, concerts, meetings, and other cultural events. The co-op began its own in-house newspaper, The Community News.

Political awareness was always part of the Amalgamated’s identity. In the beginning, the Amalgamated was predominantly white and Jewish and maintained a strong identification with Judaism. There was an Orthodox synagogue and the Workmen’s Circle, a fraternal, socialist organization dedicated to the preservation of Yiddish life and progressive idealism. The Amalgamated always was, and continues to be, a progressive community.

By the 1960s, taller buildings were built with air-conditioning and elevators, and the original four-floor walkup was torn down. At that time, the Amalgamated reached its present size of 1500 families in 11 buildings on 15 acres about a half-mile by a half mile, between Van Cortlandt Park and the Jerome Park Reservoir. Today, depending on the number of bedrooms, it costs approximately $22,000 to $44,000 to buy into the Amalgamated, and an additional $575 to $1427 per month in rent or carrying charges per month, depending on the size of the apartment and number of bedrooms. There is a 2 to 7 year waiting list (less for one bedroom, more for two and three bedrooms) and applicants are required to have a home visit before being accepted. The Amalgamated offers financing through its credit union.

The Amalgamated today is more diverse racially, religiously, and ethnically than it was in 1927. The educational and cultural activities continue, with classes and studios for ceramics, photography, painting, woodworking, visual arts, and a writers’ workshop meets regularly. The quarterly Community News and weekly Co-Op Bulletin are still printed and distributed. Today, there is a membership-based fitness facility, a playgroup, a licensed nursery, and the Circle Pines summer day camp for kids is still going strong. The Amalgamated is a designated NORC—a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community—funded by New York City, New York State, and various foundations. The large variety of social services and programs provided allow the elderly to continue living independently at the Amalgamated.

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Tea Party demonstrators carry signs calling President Obama a “socialist.” Fox News warns of a “socialist takeover of the United States.” GOP talking points focus on the “Democratic socialist agenda.” Not since the Cold War have the words “socialism” and “socialist” had such a prominent role in our political dialogue. It’s as if Glenn Beck brought Senator Joseph McCarthy and his “red baiting” back from the dead. But the political noise aside, how do Americans really feel about socialism?

Two recent national surveys shed light on this question: One conducted by the Pew Research Center, and the second by Rasmussen.

The Pew Research Center tested reactions to words and phrases frequently used in current political discourse. “Socialism,” “capitalism” and “progressive” were among words tested, and the results are surprising. Indeed, socialism is a negative for the majority of Americans, but not all Americans. And, only a slight majority of Americans regard capitalism positively.  In one of the most unexpected outcomes, a whopping 68% of respondents reacted positively to the world “progressive.”

According to the Pew survey, when considering respondents as a whole, 29% say they have a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” while 59% react negatively. When it comes to the word “capitalism” 52% react positively compared with 37% who say they have a negative reaction.

Who knew that one in three Americans has negative feelings about the word “capitalism”, and that one in four has a positive reaction to the word “socialism?” This is an amazing survey result in a country that rarely teaches about socialism in its schools, or has any meaningful media coverage of socialist countries or European social welfare states.

It gets even more interesting when we look at the Pew survey results by political affiliation:

Not surprisingly, 77% of Republicans react negatively to “socialism,” while 62% have a positive reaction to “capitalism.” Democrats are more evenly divided: 44% react positively to “socialism” and 47% react positively to capitalism”

When it comes to young people, women, people with low incomes, and the less educated, fewer than half react positively to “capitalism.” This makes sense, as these would be the groups who benefit least from a capitalist system.

No surprise, about six-in-ten Republicans (62%) react positively to “capitalism,” compared with 29% who have a negative reaction. About half of independents (52%) have a positive impression while 39% react negatively. Among Democrats, 47% react positively to “capitalism” while nearly as many (43%) react negatively.

When it comes to the word “progressive” 81% of Democrats, 64% of independents and 56% of Republicans have a positive reaction.

Other interesting findings in the Pew Survey:

• Among those younger than 30, identical percentages react positively to “socialism” and “capitalism” (43% each), while about half react negatively to each.
• More than twice as many blacks as whites react positively to “socialism” (53% vs. 24%). Yet there are no racial differences in views of “capitalism” – 50% of African Americans and 53% of whites have a positive reaction.
• Those with a high school education or less are more likely to express a positive view of “socialism” than do those with more education.
• Only 51% of moderate and liberal Republicans have a positive impression of “capitalism.”

The recent Rasmussen survey on opinions about socialism and capitalism also had interesting and surprising results.

According to the survey:

Sixty percent (60%) of U.S. adults nationwide say that capitalism is better than socialism, whereas 18% disagree, and 21% are not sure. So, according to Rasmussen, fully 39% are not completely with the American capitalist program. Young people under 30 are closely divided on the question. While Republicans and unaffiliated voters overwhelmingly say that capitalism is better, just 43% of Democrats agree. Twenty-four percent (24%) or almost one in four Democrats say socialism is better.

Additional Rasmussen findings suggest Americans are not happy with the behavior of capitalist institutions and the current corporate/government relationship:

• Seventy-three percent (73%) of Americans believe that Goldman Sachs is likely to have committed fraud as charged by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Seven-out-of-10 Americans believe that government and big business work together against the interests of consumers and investors.

• Just 24% believe the government is capable of adequately monitoring the dealings of Wall Street financial firms. Fifty-three percent (53%) say it is not.

What is remarkable about these two surveys is that, while capitalism is still the favored economic system of most Americans, a surprising number are open to socialism.  And this at a time when Republicans and corporate owned media are churning out socialist scare stories and misinformation 24/7. Perhaps it is a sign of widespread economic distress and a loss of trust in the capitalist institutions that is shifting the American opinion on both capitalism and socialism.

The weakness of these surveys is that there is widespread confusion over the meaning of the word  “socialism.” For sure, confusion exists about socialist countries with state-run economies, such as Venezuela, vs. social welfare states with heavily regulated capitalist economies, such as Norway and Sweden.  Many respondents had positive feelings about both capitalism and socialism suggesting a desire for a European social welfare state model.

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One of my favorite progressive authors, Naomi Klein, posted a much-needed correction of a recent piece by Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, titled “How Milton Friedman Saved Chile,” in which he compares earthquake damage in Haiti and Chile. Klein’s correction  underscores a dangerous trend in our country—that lies and misinformation are being pushed by our news media on a daily basis, without embarrassment or apology. In this example, Klein discovers that Stephens wrongly credits the Friedman-style, free market economics of the Pinochet years with providing better building codes in Chile. Forget that Milton Friedman never was a champion of building codes or anything else that would stand in the way of unfettered capitalism.

According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous “Chicago Boys” are the reason Chile is a prosperous nation with “some of the world’s strictest building codes.”

There is one rather large problem with this theory: Chile’s modern seismic building code, drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody U.S-backed coup. That means that if one person deserves credit for the law, it is not Friedman, or Pinochet, but Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist President. (In truth many Chileans deserve credit, since the laws were a response to a history of quakes, and the first law was adopted in the 1930s).

Naomi Klein’s piece provides us with the real story of pre-coup Chile, the Chile of the 1960s, which “had the best health and education systems on the continent, as well as a vibrant industrial sector and rapidly expanding middle class.” She reminds us that Chileans believed in their government, and freely elected Allende to further their democratic socialist project. And, yes, that the United States was central in overthrowing the Allende government and in installing a brutal dictator. I’m happy Naomi Klein took the time to set the record straight.

Naomi Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rises of Disaster Capitalism and a contributor to The Nation and The Huffington Post.

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