Socializing

EVERY YEAR the U.S. government spends billions of tax payer dollars subsidizing select major American corporations and industries. Large aircraft and arms manufacturers come to mind, whose very existence is dependent upon federal funding. Agriculture, corporate as well as small family farms, benefit from teh federal price support system,put in place during the great depression by the Roosevelt administration. The fact of life for American growers is that they are the victims of their own success. So great is agricultural production all across the fruited plain that there is a perpetual food glut in America, an annual food surplus of such vast proportions that food prices on the open market are driven downward by oversupply. This alone would drive thousands of small farmers into bankruptcy if Uncle Sam did not have their backs by buying up their surplus yield, and by paying them to let fields lie fallow. Another term for this, a succinct and accurate term, is "socialism", socialism for the corporations, often, socialism for the wealthy.Corporate socialism rears its ugly, much maligned head whenever an economic crash send Wall Street into a depreciating spiral, requiring a federal bailout, as happened in 2007-2008 under presidents Bush and Obama. Vociferously though the great bailout was criticized by both ends of the political spectrum, two facts stand out. It was necessary, and it worked, as witnessed by the eventual complete recovery of the financial services industry, upon which the American economic system is totally reliant, and the fact that General Motors, once dead on the side of the road, recovered nicely, and repaid its entire government loan, with interest. Without FDR's socialist policies during the New Deal the American economy might have gone under, for good. The unavoidable fact is that capitalism cannot survive without socialist intervention; the free market is too inherently unstable,its violent fluctuations too severe to withstand alone. Conservative neo-liberal free market purists live in a fantasy world, one in which America must never allow socialism to enter the country, and any faint trace of if spells doom, and eventual communism. They live in a theoretical world. Here, in the real one, socialism pervades every aspect of every life; streets, roads, bridges, social security, medicare, medicaid - the list is nearly endless. Every American is part socialist, whether or not he wants or admits to being. The next time president Trump accept yet another bailout from us tax payers for one of his bizarre bankruptcy filings, he will undoubtedly fail to admit or admit that he has often been the beneficiary of socialism, because, like all conservatives, he simply doesn't know what socialism is. Or, most likely, he pretends not to know, for the sake of his warped, twisted political ideology.