Exactly right, SD Transplant, you’ve now seen the man behind the curtain here in the US and he’s the same one that used to be hold the levers of power behind the iron curtain. The US is totally socialist, just in a different and less honest way. Look how many people work for the government either directly or indirectly. Contractors, weapons makers, Halliburton, Blackwater mercenaries, drug companies (new medicare bill) etc… all suckle the government teat while crowing endlessly about the glories of the free market.
Here’s the way I like to think about it. Communism failed because it naively assumed that only the capitalist and bourgeois classes were susceptible to cheating and dishonest, greedy behavior. Capitalism is doomed to fail because it naively assumes that the capitalist class isn’t susceptible to cheating and dishonest, greedy behavior.
Of course none of this matters if we continue voting for these same creeps over and over. Do you remember how the media would smugly report about elections in Iraq back in the 90s, when Saddam would get re-elected with 99% of the vote? We’d all chuckle and have a good laugh about their sham government — meanwhile, back in the good old U S of A, our congressional re-election rate is more than 90% for senators and 98% for representatives!. Soviet politburo members had less job security than our congressmen.
Bottom line — governments all lie, cheat, and steal. They just call it different names in different places and some are more sophisticated at it than others.