Is Judd Gregg really blind to socialism or just a fool in The Hill?

New Hampshire’s former senator and governor Judd Gregg is menaced by socialism and worried, very worried about growing support for Bernie Sanders’ bid for president. I wonder what trigger threshold, visible only to financial industry lobbyists and certain Democratic pundits Bernie just reached.

In an opinion piece in The Hill titled: Sanders fans are blind to reality of socialism Gregg wonders where “a significant percentage of the Democratic ‘base’ is headed.”

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Charts documenting Denmark’s socialist “hell”. [not from Gregg’s opinion piece]

Says Gregg in The Hill: Now large segments of the Democratic Party are embracing with gusto the socialist creed as carried forth by Sanders — and at a less dramatic level by the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Gregg suggests Sanders’ support comes from naive college age voters, schooled in the dark arts of socialism by professors who fail, he says to teach of “the horrors of socialism.”

They might start with the experience of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Notice the name. Or the National Socialist movement called Nazism. Notice the name again. Or Maoist China, a socialist state again in name. Millions of people died under these banners of socialism and millions more were impoverished.

Notice this name: The Securities Industry & Financial Marketers Association.  I imagine they wouldn’t welcome any extra scrutiny from Sen. Warren or a President Sanders and for years they paid Gregg millions to help avoid that possibility. Juddsifma

It is no secret but The Hill doesn’t bother to mention in his bio that most recently Gregg was not senator or governor but the CEO of the Securities Industry & Financial Marketers Association, an industry lobby group. SIFMA in 2014 spent $7,430,000 on lobbying, and made political contributions totaling $833,175.

Thankfully Gregg (or his ghostwriters; could he actually write this stuff?) doesn’t belabor the fascist/red baiting theme for more than a beat before trying a different angle. He evokes American exceptionlism and chants the holy names of the American hyper rich: Zuckerberg, Musk, Schultz, and Gates.

They all give America a unique economic edge in a competitive world. And they are all products of America, and our market economy.

Try to find such opportunity or such prosperity in a socialist nation.

Well Gregg might be shocked — shocked! — to learn that socialist Denmark has a rapidly rising number of dollar millionaires [individuals whose net wealth exceeds one million US dollars]. This in part is due to Danish stock prices increasing more rapidly than those in other European countries, according to a 2015 report on worldwide wealth patterns by the Royal Bank of Canada.  That’s a kicker — a growing number of millionaires and a thriving equities market in a nation where socialism has been allowed to run rampant!

 Some 69,000 Danes can proudly call themselves millionaires when measured in US dollars, reveals RBC’s annual World Wealth Report.

“[…] the Danish dollar-millionaire club is growing significantly faster than in most European countries. In 2011, there were only 45,600 Danes that fell into this category – a figure that has since risen by 51 percent.

“The number of dollar millionaires is rapidly rising,” Jacob Graven, chief economist at Sydbank, told Ekstra Bladet.

So Judd, who is going to tell all the Danes and their recent millionaires they are living and thriving in a socialist hell? Or maybe if he closes his eyes real tight, he can keep pretending they just don’t exist.

One thought on “Is Judd Gregg really blind to socialism or just a fool in The Hill?

  1. I’m sure it is unsettling for the corporate class to get a load of where the U.S. electorate may be going.

    Even if Bernie does not succeed in clinching the nomination, public sentiment has been permanently altered. ‘Socialism’ isn’t the bugaboo for a new generation of voters that it once was to their grandparents.

    Shapes of things to come.

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