President Barack Obama’s health care reforms have been labeled by his critics as ‘socialized medicine.’

He wants to address school children in order to promote his ‘socialist agenda.’ Etc., etc.

So what is Socialism, and is our president a Socialist? Adam Turl, a longtime member of the International Socialist Organization, is seeking to organize a chapter at SIU. He weighed in on the topic.

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‘One of the biggest slurs peddled by the right wing about Socialism is the idea that Socialism is merely about state control or intervention in the economy,’ Turl said. ‘Whether it’s handing nearly $1 trillion to Wall Street bankers or subsidizing school lunches for poor kids – they call it Socialism.

‘Socialists, however, believe that food, housing, health care and education should be unalienable rights and should be publicly supported, but Socialists are equally against giving billions of dollars (in workers’ tax money) to the giant corporations that wrecked the economy with their greed in the first place.’

Turl dismissed the rhetoric about Obama’s Socialist leanings.

‘I was surprised to hear that President Obama was a Socialist. As a friend of mine has joked, we haven’t seen him at any of the meetings. The fact is that Obama is trying to salvage a Capitalist system plagued by two faltering wars and systemic economic crisis. His goal hasn’t been to replace Capitalism with something else,’ Turl said.

‘The reforms he’s put forward have been very modest-far more modest than those pushed by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930’s,’ he said.

Turl felt Obama’s moderation has conceded political terrain to the Republicans who had been totally discredited in the 2008 election and hold no real power in either the Senate or House.

Obama’s right wing critics like to raise the specter of ‘rationing’ in health care, but the practice is already used by profit-motivated private health insurance companies, Turl said.

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‘We already have so-called ‘death panels,’ i.e., the boards of insurance corporations that regularly deny care in order to keep profits high,’ he said.

Turl said Socialists favor, at a minimum, a universal single-payer health care system — removing the profit motive and designating health care as a human right.

‘Unfortunately, Corporate America seems to have veto power over what is even discussed,’ Turl said. ‘Now it seems that the White House and Senate are set to drop the public option, too, leaving us with another version of the status quo.’

Turl ([email protected]) also stressed that the bailout of financial institutions was not compatible with Socialism, amounting to a massive transfer of wealth from workers to the richest and most powerful people in the world.

‘Socialism aims to put control of society’s wealth in the hands of the working people who created that wealth in the first place,’ Turl said. ‘The banks could have been nationalized outright and ordered to put a moratorium on foreclosures, cap credit card interest rates and ordered to fund projects that would benefit the majority in society.’

Springston is a graduate student in the MAT program.