Oleg Atbashian made it clear: he doesn't think the United States is a socialist country, like his native Russia was for most of the last century.

"No reasonable man would say we're living under socialism," Atbashian, a former Soviet propaganda artist turned Brooklyn-based writer and humorist, told about 200 members of the Lehigh Valley Tea Party Friday night at the Chrin Community Center in Palmer Township.

Still, he says he sees signs of "socialist trends" in America. During his roughly hour-long talk, he drew parallels between the American media reporting on the salaries of CEO's and actors and pre-collapse Soviet government wanting people to inform on their neighbors.

His audience jeered as he described one of his children taking part in a school project -- this was after he'd moved his family from Russian to New York in the 1990s -- where they had to name things they would change about the U.S. Constitution.

The suggestions included things about the right to health care, the right to work. Atbashian took issue with this, telling the principal "We had all those things in the Soviet constitution and it didn’t do any good."

And while Atbashian clearly had no love for the old Soviet system, he seemed to almost compliment it for doing certain things better.

For example, he argued that schools in the Soviet Union gave children "three times" the knowledge that American public schools do. And he pointed to certain things -- "depravity in the media," "new age religions," "union strikes" -- that weren't allowed in communist Russia but exist in America.

"What was not tolerated [there] is promoted here," he said. "I still love it here," Atbashian added later. "Don't get me wrong."

Meanwhile, group members say their media campaign is still on track with the "We're Still Watching" billboard ready to go up over Route 22 on Monday.