One of the more disturbing events of our disturbing times was the revelation that Pfizer CEO Dr. Albert Bourla informed the Biden campaign about the success of his company’s COVID-19 vaccine before the current president and his administration.
In fact, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he learned about the breakthrough from media reports—this although President Donald Trump and his people gave significant support—financial and otherwise—via Operation Warp Speed to Bourla’s company, something the Pfizer CEO tried to deny.
Now that Trump has signed the executive order he promised making the vaccine free for all, the company stands to make a killing at taxpayer expense.
What we are witnessing is the infiltration of the Chinese system into America. We can call it “Socialism With American Characteristics,” our own version of “Socialism With Chinese Characteristics.”
(Actually, both are a masquerade for government-structured oligarchic capitalism—more on that later.)
We would likely see much more of this, perhaps a complete takeover by this approach, in a Biden-Harris administration.
The system in China dates back to Deng Xiaoping, who rescued the Chinese economy from the extreme impoverishment that stemmed from the strictures of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-thought during the Cultural Revolution. He did this by informing the citizenry that he didn’t care if a cat was black or white as long it captured mice, a witty metaphor telling the Chinese people that a form of capitalism was okay ... up to a point.
Unfortunately, Deng, who seemed so modern, didn’t abandon the totalitarian aspects of communism, as we saw demonstrated since he was in charge during the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Now we have China under Xi Jinping continuing with Xi’s version of “Socialism With Chinese Characteristics,” allowing for a “socialism,” undoubtedly unrecognizable to Marx, that can make you a plutocrat billionaire as long as you or sufficient numbers of your executives are members of the Chinese Communist Party and mouth “egalitarian” communist rhetoric, as ludicrously hypocritical as it is.
In reality, it’s a get-rich scheme for those who don’t care about despotism or can make peace with it. It’s a far more orderly system than free-market capitalism, with fewer opportunities for advancement among the hoi polloi unless they join the party or leave the country.
“Socialism With American Characteristics” will be somewhat subtler at first because of the numbers of people in our society who grew up believing in such things as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, traditions of Anglo-Saxon culture that date back to the Magna Carta and have no place in communist China or communist anything.
Our schools, however, not to mention popular culture and a good swathe of our media, have been preparing the way for some time for the dissolution of these traditions. What are “woke-ness” and “cancel culture” but a frontal assault on free speech?
If the word “socialism” makes some of our people recoil, at least in the short run, it doesn’t matter. It’s not really socialism anyway. That’s a myth. It’s really oligarchic capitalism similar to what you have in Russia, with the government determining winners and losers. China is just a spruced-up, more effective version of that, with some of the rhetoric still intact and other parts altered to fit the business climate.
Marx claimed he was endeavoring to achieve the “withering away of the state.” This is the opposite.
Ours will be a country governed by an alliance of corporate giants from tech to Big Pharma (see Pfizer) in league with self-described liberal or progressive politicians who profit directly and/or indirectly from them.
The masses would remain, well, the masses.
In other words, “Socialism With American Characteristics” would be post-modern serfdom.
How do we stop it?
For now, elect Republican senators in Georgia to put a temporary brake on things.
Then, we have a lot of thinking to do.
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