With the right wing claiming that Obama is a socialist, we have a reality check from Conor Clarke who shows in the above chart how much of corporate and business assets are really held by the government. (Click on chart for larger image.) It is hard to take claims of socialism seriously when it is only about one-fifth of one percent.
If Obama was really a socialist he would be expected to be seizing entire industries, not reluctantly getting involved in companies which requested that the government get in. He would also be expanding his nationalization of business to include more industries. He certainly would not have limited his “nationalization” to companies which are in trouble and which present more problems than they are worth. If the goal was socialism, we would also see the boards become packed with government bureaucrats, instead of businessmen who are working towards making GM profitable in order to terminate the high degree of government ownership.
The Republicans pretend that it is Democrats who back government in the economy but in many ways they are even more guilty. In the Bush years we had Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Bush’s Medicare D plan was basically a joint effort with the insurance industry to funnel them government money in return for all their financial support to him. The Republicans in the Congress were no better with the K Street Project. Go further back in time and we had the ultimate perversion of the market system under Richard Nixon with wage and price controls.
