Did Socialist David Schweickart Plan with Obama-A Market Socialist Takeover for the Market Crash?
Professor David Schweickart of Loyola University has been a long time advocate of what he calls “economic democracy” or “market socialism” for many years. He has asserted for some time that capitalism will eventually die out and should be replaced by an alternative process. Ideally his proposed system would include ownership by the workers of means of production with leadership democratically elected from the workers, government ownership of the banking system, and strict limitations of trade between nations. Corporations would pay all earnings to government banks. The government would distribute the income as it saw fit.
In 2002 he described his now famous “L-Curve” which is a graphic representation of the wealth and income distribution inequities in the United States. He noted that the wealth distribution was much worse than the income distribution. Notably he remarked that people who have an income like doctors and lawyers of just over one hundred thousand a year were more like the lower class than the upper 1/2% of the wealthy. Flat tax rates and tax cuts could only increase these disparities especially the wealth disparity. He felt that society must find a way to rebuild the community after capitalism to a better system.
When Barack Obama joined the Presidential race, Professor Schweickart become one of the founding members of the Progressives for Obama (website http://progressivesforobama.net/ ). Members of the organization include many Hollywood celebrities including those who may have paid $40,000 to be with Obama recently in California for his private Barbara Streisand concert. Other members include editors for the Huffington Post, AFL-CIO leaders, and many others.
Many outsiders initially questioned why Obama would agree to the bailout and in fact even his friends on the Huffington post were initially skeptical that it would not appropriate for a Democrat. However, a recent review of a debate that occurred in 2007 in which Professor Schweickart was discussing which alternatives to capitalism were better may shed light on the matter. In this debate, Dr. Schweickart made some predictions about how progressives could start to lay down some groundwork for taking over the economic system and changing it away from capitalism. This scenario was set with the initial conditions being that a progressive party candidate would be in place to take charge if there was a sudden collapse of the stock market. If done correctly, a takeover could occur he said without any violence or revolution.
The Professor advocated that the following steps would be done. First, the government would buy up and take over the assets of the corporations. He was very enthusiastic that a stock market crisis would make such a take over “not very difficult”. There would an enormous clamor for the public to push the government to act quickly which would be advantageous for the takeover.
The next step would be turn the corporations over to the workers to run. (How this was done he did not explain exactly but it would seem plausible to assume that government take over would be the first step.)The capitalist class would disappear because all the paper wealth would be gone. Corporations would stop paying dividends. (Further removal of wealth from capitalist could be done by taxes). Corporations would send all their profits to government owned banks. Basically all wealth would be given to government to hand out as it sees fit.
Here is an MP3 of David Schweickart’s takeover scenario in his own words:
More than a year ago, Professor Schweickart made some amazingly accurate predictions about what Barack Obama would be in a position to accomplish. Given his close association with Obama and his supporters does it not seem very reasonable to question how Mr. Obama’s tax plan, removal of free trade, Employment Free Choice Act, and capital gains tax might now seem to fit into the socialist take over model.
Does Mr. Obama want to convert the economy from capitalism to “market socialism”?
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