Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, in a bid to flip the script of an impending loss, as suggested by a slew of polls, has sought to label Democrat Barack Obama's plan to raise taxes on the richest five per cent of the United States population as socialist. While McCain has steered clear of calling Obama himself a socialist, his latest attack provides more ammunition for cynics who say his election platform has morphed into a desperate lunge for power.

Obama has been accused of "palling around with terrorists" and has been called "the young, black Adolf Hitler" by a Republican blogger. Some Americans still believe Obama is a Muslim or an Arab. Both claims, of course, couldn't be further from the truth. None of the baseless rhetoric geared towards stirring animosity has quite stuck - at least not among the majority of independent voters whose ballots will likely swing the final result 'red' or 'blue'.

Smear campaigns, whether formal or informal, have become a staple of the election hustings. McCain's latest barb unearths morbid memories of those dreadful 'isms' which hark back to some of the darkest chapters in human history. Marxism, communism, Stalinism and Leninism are philosophies built on government intervention, class struggle and an attempt to redistribute wealth, usually inefficiently, to the poor.

Obama's comment about "spreading the wealth" may well have been ill-advised, particularly in the United States (US) media where every sound bite is a headliner and every 'Joe the Plumber' can get his 15 minutes of fame. But his proposal may have some merit for a middle class with shrinking wealth. Capitalism's triumphant march, as backed by fans of unfettered deregulation such as McCain, may crush society's weakest, most vulnerable and gullible when white-collar exploiters manipulate the markets. It was deregulation that laid the foundation for Wall Street executives to woo new homebuyers, who were unable to maintain mortgage payments, which eventually sparked the current financial crisis.

Tax-cut plan

If Obama's tax-cut plan is socialist, as McCain has hinted, so too was Congress' approval of a US$700-billion bailout plan which, even many House Republicans agree, is a safety net for carefree investors and a golden parachute for the business elite. Following McCain's line of argument, he and the other 262 members of the House who approved the bailout were socialists too - for protecting poor and middle-class workers and businessmen who would suffer major fallout if government failed to intervene.

Socialism is oftentimes associated with totalitarian leaders or populist regimes not hesitant to nationalise industries and punish foreign investors deemed predators. The ambition of distributing wealth to the masses as propounded by modern Latin American socialists such as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa has proved to be more bombast and blather than reality.

Polarising

Say the word 'socialism' and antennae shoot up. Jamaicans can remember former Prime Minister Michael Manley's mantra of democratic socialism and its polarising effect in the 1970s. Many of socialism's paternalistic tenets are evident in the so-called free world: Using McCain's definition, Iceland's and Trinidad's system of tuition-free, state-run university education and Jamaica's no-fee public hospital care paradigm may well have socialist strains, as they seek to give the least wealthy social strata a level playing field with the rich.

Capitalism - without conscience - can be dangerous and can bring any economy, or empire, to its knees. Whether that conscience is called welfare or social security, it is clear that absolute deregulation is inimical to the sustenance of modern democracy.

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