When I was doing research for my diary about "Worst President in modern American history," I noticed that the historians (I'm guessing they bear some vague relation to actual historians; I didn't check their credentials) tended to give a lot of the Presidents in the period before the US Civil War really low ratings.

Something/Someone Old

It's no secret that capitalists don't understand what socialism is. When they talk about socialism they mix in communism, fascism, feminism, atheism, and just about any other word that scares them. So it's no surprise that the vast majority of Americans have no idea what socialism is.
The surprising thing is that the vast majority of Americans fail to understand what capitalism is either. Even professional capitalists appear ignorant of how capitalism works.

I'm surprised that they haven't killed him already.
Maybe it's because they know that the Church of Capitalism is more powerful than the Church of Rome.

Remember that the last pope was literally a Nazi.
Now the Pope sounds like a socialist. One could get whiplash from the change.

In 2013

In China there are a lot of problems, but at the moment, the Chinese, the party these days has proven an extraordinary ability to change. I make the joke, in America you can change political parties but you can't change policies. In China you cannot change the party but you can change policies. So in the 65 or 66 years, China has been run by one single party, yet the political changes that have taken place in China this past 66 years have been wider and broader and greater than probably any other major country in modern memory.

So in that time China has ceased to be communist. Is that what you are saying?

China is a market economy, it is not a capitalist country. Here's why. There's no way a group of billionaires could control the politburo as billionaires control American policy making.

So in China you have a vibrant market economy, but capital does not arise above political authority. Capital does not have enshrined rights. In America the interest of capital or capital itself has risen above the American nation. The political authority cannot check the power of capital. That's why America is a capitalist country. But China is not.

h/t lookout

America is a failure for the 99%. Why, in the early 21st Century, are major institutions in this country prone to so many frequent, repeating, foreseeable, and avoidable failures? Americans respect authority far too much. Our elites are very good at self-deception, and they are leading us over a cliff.

Race to the Bottom

www.minuteman.media.org

"Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism."
- Rosa Luxemburg