On the audacity of President Obama's Marxism

In my daily blog I defended –at length but with no enthusiasm- the far-right charge that President Obama is some sort of Marxist (http://radicalrons.blogspot.com).

The President is a very charismatic leader and created a lot of excitement here in Rhode Island yesterday (October 31). Now I can never forget his Gregg's visit and "death by chocolate".

But the Gregg's treat is no doubt as exaggerated as President Obama's Marxism. His TRICK is to make a modest proposal -an increase in the minimum wage- sound like the "The Audacity of Hope" : "No one in America should be working 40 hours a week and living below the poverty level. No one. No one" (the way Vice President Biden phrased it earlier in the month)

Would it be OK for millions of minimum wage workers to support a family-or even just themselves- AT THE POVERTY LEVEL?  Is that still unacceptable (to our ruling class) Marxism?

Assuming our billionaire executives also work JUST 40 hours a week, should they live not just above the poverty line but at the level of the ONE PERCENT?

What mental and physical exertions by our employed executive class merit this earthly paradise ? Science has only one objective way to measure human effort- calories. But what use is a clinical thermometer in determining wages and salaries?

Long ago Karl Marx presented his  "controversial" (to bourgeois philistines) labor theory of value. It implies that the rich are really oppressors and exploiters of the working class. Now THAT is audacity.

But in truth President Obama and the whole parade of LIBERAL Democrats here in Rhode Island are not even as audacious as President Franklin D. Roosevelt who spoke harshly about the greedy rich at the very beginning of the Great Depression. And if this American aristocrat was no Marxist- then certainly President Obama is not one.

From this socialist: two cheers for the minimum wage!