Robert Reich Accosted at Airport for being a "Commie" - Are You Kidding Me?

Complaints about the level of political discourse in this country have perhaps never been so plentiful. They may transpire when some one does something as common as knee jerk responding to a blog post, or as serious as confronting a person in an airport, such as apparently happened to Robert Reich and detailed in his blog.

According to Prof. Reich (a frequent guest on Chris Hayes’ ALL In, on MSNBC) he was abruptly stopped while making his way to an airport concourse, and asked by some knuckle –dragger:

"Are you Robert Reich?”

Reich answered in the affirmative whereupon the loony tune hurled an epithet Reich's way – like certain innominate bloggers, yelping:

“You’re a Commie f*ck head!”

Reich, unable to process or accept that such a whacko could be walking around free, not locked up in a straight jacket, responded: “I’m sorry?”, thinking he had misunderstood him. Whereupon the nut responded again:

“You’re a Commie fuck head!.”

Reich blogged that his “mind raced through several possibilities. Was I in danger? That seemed doubtful. He was well-dressed and had a briefcase in one hand. He couldn’t have gotten through the checkpoint with a knife or gun. Should I just walk away? Probably. But what if he followed me? Regardless, why should I let him get away with insulting me?”

Reich then decided to respond, as civilly as he could, saying first, he was wrong, and second asking where he got the information. At that juncture the source of 99% of the stupidity and political ignorance in this country was exposed:

“Fox News. Bill O’Reilly says you’re a Communist.”

Ah yes, Bill O’Reilly! The same guy that used to teach English at my high school, Monsignor Pace – until the Marist Brothers had to read him the riot act about political digressions. Well, he finally found his calling as a know-nothing blabbermouth and blowhard on FOX.

Evidently, according to Reich, a year or so earlier O’Reilly did say on his Fox News show that Reich "was a Communist." The basis for the claim? His arguing for higher taxes on the wealthy! On the fuckin’ wealthy!! The ones who now have so much money, so many giant houses over 20,000 square feet, and so many Rolls Royces and blood diamonds they don’t know what to do with them! And this Foxite moron thinks higher taxes make a “commie”?

What really does is first, nationalization of all resources and companies – taking including oil, banking and investments and turning them all over to the state. After that, stripping the wealthy of all their excess riches and re-distributing them to those who need them the most, including: the unemployed older workers, under paid women, the homeless and vulnerable families with hungry kids – now made even hungrier since Repuke fucks cut the food stamps by $4b

As Karl Marx noted in Das Kapital this is justified given that the wealthiest got that way by expropriating the surplus value of labor. Say the labor value sold as a product was L, and V is the labor value embodied in the production of the item, then the surplus value S is:

S = L - V

As an illustration, assume that a craftsman working for a company is paid $10 an hour to make beautiful mahogany chairs by hand. He takes 10 hours to make one chair, thereby imparting a discrete labor value of 10hr x $10/ hr = $100 into the chair, invested in his blood, sweat and maybe tears. The chair is then sold at retail for $1,000 by the company. Then the surplus value S is:

S = $1,000 - $100 = $900

Hence, in this light, V is the paid labor and S is the unpaid labor. The amount of labor expropriated is therefore equal to $900.

In other words, the ultra-wealthy capitalist feathers his own nest at the expense of his workers and their kids.

A real communist would – after seizing all excess wealth of the richest – tax the rich assholes at least at 90% - not the paltry increase to Clintonian rates (39.5%) as Reich proposed. If a person can’t tell a real commie from a mere egalitarian capitalist, like Reich he or she has no business ranting or engaging in political discourse at all. Better yet, any future dummies that confront someone like Reich in an airport and barf out “Commie!” need to be dropped off at Komodo Island. We will be sure to give ‘em a little pocket knife to fight off the hundreds of flesh-eating Komodo dragons!