Tuesday, January 01, 2008

John Edwards - The Anti-Capitalist Candidate

Rich Lowry's syndicated column provides some eye-opening details of John Edwards' presidential campaign focus against "money-grubbing corporations."
His campaign pitch is a well-polished mailed fist aimed at the gut of the establishment, defined by Edwards as heartless, money-grubbing corporations.

“This corporate greed is killing the middle class, killing American jobs and it is stealing your children’s future,” Edwards tells a rapt crowd of a couple hundred people in the lobby of a high school here.

The reason we don’t have universal health coverage, according to Edwards, is “very simple” — the drug companies and insurance companies oppose it. In fact, everything is “very simple” to him. In his down-home Manichaean vision, dark corporate forces are responsible for everything he doesn’t like.

This is a worldview that doesn’t allow for legitimate differences of opinion. On the one side is “the glorification of corporate greed,” and on the other are the people willing to fight it — everyone in between is either a tool or a coward. Battle lines drawn, Edwards’s vision bristles with evocations of power. The people will have to wield the “sovereign power” of the country against corporations that will only “give their power away when we take their power away from them.”
This is scary stuff. We actually have a major party candidate openly touting Socialism on a National scale as his answer for the United States (a topic that is addressed in Jonah's new book).

I cannot speak for everyone, but I am counting on those obscene corporate profits to pay for my retirement. Edwards' wish to wipe-out or otherwise confiscate these profits will also wipe-out the plans of any American relying on something other than government hand-outs for retirement.

John Edwards financial ignorance is without bound. The fact that he has found buyers for his rhetoric in Iowa says something about those rubes.

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