« previous | TPM CAFÉ READER POSTS HOME | next »
Fascism is the Name for What's Happening
In my previous admittedly stream of consciousness post, I made a couple of misstatements I think important to correct. First, I used the term "lacky" to describe the corporate relationship to the government. I should have referred to the corporations as the government's master, not lacky. Thanks to a reader for correcting me, though somewhat angrily.
A second reader pointed to my use of the word socialism. Indeed, I only referred to socialism because it is the word "conservatives" often use when opposing "liberal" domestic programs like national health care (i.e. socialized medicine). The reader reminded me that was is happening with the corporate bailout is not socialism, that there is another word for it.
Frankly, that word is fascism. It's no secret that corporations are fascist entities themselves, where decisions are made by a select few that can affect millions of people who have no say in the matter. But this government-corporate "partnership" (for lack of a better term) is the epitome of fascism. As Mussolini and his partner Giovanni Gentile wrote in 1932,
We are, in other words, a state which controls all forces actingDecisions (and their tax dollars) are being taken out of the hands of the people and given to the corporate criminals who created this whole mess, no doubt something that will further enrich them if the proper safeguards and oversight are not imposed.
in nature. We control political
forces, we control moral forces we
control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative
state (emphasis added).
We are on the precipice of something quite dangerous. Which direction will our government go? What will the people, the governed who give their consent, do about it?
Comments (25)
I realize it is bad form to double post... but I think this may have gotten lost in the shuffle and it seems to tie in neatly with this particular thread
______________________________________
This Meltdown Is Simply the Shock Doctrine In Living Color
September 23, 2008, 11:58AM
This meltdown is simply the Shock Doctrine in living color! No wonder they want no regulation or oversight, no limit of executive windfalls. No wonder they don't even want to run this the way the S&L closures were handled!! Those measures simply fixed things. They want to change them forever!
I just made the connection while I was listening to Stephanie Miller, of all things.
It's all spelled out in "The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism" by Naomi Klein.
I'm sure you're familiar: the Chicago school of economics and Milton Friedman came up with this model (based on psychology experiments aimed at "erasing " the human psyche) for how to "reset" a government and reshape it the way the power elite want it, as opposed to the way the people have set it up.
We tried this out in central and South America. You either engineer or take advantage of a huge political revolution with violence and chaos everywhere. In the aftermath, people are so shocked that they become submissive to anyone who shows leadership and confidence, and they allow that person to change the government.
9/11 was a non-economic version of the Shock Doctrine in action. In the aftermath of that terrible event, people became submissive to a very assertive government and surrendered our civil liberties- the very things that make us Americans- in order to "protect " America.
People who normally would never have permitted the sort of constitutional intrusion that Bush proposed went along, and even helped intimidate others into acquiescence. And now we have changed our view of fundamental liberties: habeas corpus, right to privacy, freedom of speech- right down to the very Bill of Rights our country was built on! And we let it happen!!
So here we have that "shocking event" that is needed to allow Bush to remake our financial structure in the same way. He and the Republican congress loosened regulatory control just enough to allow this economic meltdown to happen deliberately, so they could reset our financial structure.
Because they've known for a long time that this was coming!The government could have intervened before it turned into a crisis, but back then, stepping in was called "socialism" by the same Republicans screaming for a blank check today.
If this bill is passed as written, it will fundamentally change our financial structure. This is why, above all else, the most important thing is that this legislation MUST have a sunset clause to expire in 6 months and allow calmer heads (and a stronger dem majority) to re-evaluate it.
Please- tell everyone we must call our congressional reps and scream bloody murder! Do NOT allow disaster capitalism to make a long-term disaster of our nation!
Thanks to my good friend TL for this.
September 24, 2008 10:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Your premise is that corporations are running the government? I'm not sure that is at all clear right now. Why not see what the situation looks like when the dust settles? The Bush administration can do nothing without the Congress.
September 24, 2008 11:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not necessarily running the government per se, but certainly does well to lobby, write the legislation, and convince the government do often to corporate America's bidding. This has been the case throughout American history, particularly the 20th Century. And the whole Clinton neo-liberal order of international economic policy (NAFTA, GATT, WTO, etc.) has called the shots primarily on behalf of corporations. So no, corporations don't actually vote on and pass legislation, execute the law, etc. But it is quite obvious, with or without this current crisis, that the United States government is very much in the hands of corporations.
September 24, 2008 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
When will you ACTUALLY be learning US history, instead of making sweeping generalizations based upon unfounded assumptions in effort to "substantiate" your oversimplification into conspirabunk?
September 24, 2008 7:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
This was hardly necessary. Nothing that is written above is a "conspiracy" as much as a coincidence. Your objection needs to be a little more informed.
Isn't irony fun?
Doesn't take a conspiracy to create a culture of corruption. It can come about from thousands of individuals looking out for number one and a complacent electorate who can't seem to stay awake for more than a few years at a time. Government is riddled with lobbyists and former CEOs and business is riddled with former policy makers and elected officials.
The last forty years have created a fascist government in the United States without a shot being fired besides those in our inner cities.
September 25, 2008 6:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
While the point of corporations already running the government is debatable, it is not a primary fascist characteristic.
I would expect you to know that.
September 24, 2008 6:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're right. It is one of the characteristics. Wrapping everything the government does in the flag is another one. Consolidating control, eliminating opposition is another. All have been happening here, in my opinion, at different rates and to different degrees over the last 40 years or so.
September 25, 2008 8:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
hasnt the bush administration done everything without the congress?
Please remember the "national emergency" clause in the Patriot Act which allows autocratic intervention by the executive branch. Also note the unprecedented deployment of an entire Army brigade to the US for crowd control. McCain's attempt to "suspend" the campaign might be a lead-in for calling off the whole shebang, sending W back to Crawford and making Cheney the emperor!
September 24, 2008 8:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sounds like "Seven Days In May." You in the trade?
September 25, 2008 9:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
LaRouche: "This Is Straight-Out Fascism"
September 23, 2008 (LPAC)--Lyndon LaRouche today warned Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson that his bailout scheme, particularly its demand, in Section 8, for absolute dictatorial decision-making powers over all aspects of the trillion-dollar bailout, "is straight-out fascism. And the American people will never tolerate this.'' LaRouche candidly added, "The American people are being screwed, and they shall not take it kindly, I would hope.''
In the past 24 hours, a handful of people have begun to join LaRouche in calling this looting swindle for what it is. In a column in today's New York Times by David Brooks, three critics of the bailout scheme were quoted. William Greider warned, "If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims.'' Christopher Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics wrote, "The joyous reception from Congressional Democrats to Paulson's latest massive bailout proposal smells an awful lot like yet another corporatist love fest between Washington's one-party government and the Sell Side investment banks.'' But Brooks himself added, "If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We're not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We're not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We're entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable--and often oligarchic--framework for capitalist endeavor.'' Economist Kling commented, on his own website, hours after the Brook article appeared, musing, "Progressive corporatism--I guess it goes down easier than liberal fascism.''
Indeed, more than 30 years ago, Lyndon LaRouche warned about the dangers of "fascism with a democratic face,'' and singled out the David Rockefeller interests as the chief American architects of this fascism. Today, the same Rockefeller interests are driving the outright corporatist/Fascist schemes of the likes of Felix Rohatyn, including his so-called Public Private Partnership Initiatives, which have been aggressively peddled by Rohatyn clones, Rockefeller Foundation director Judith Rudin, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"They are all fascists, of the classic fascist/corporatist tradition,'' LaRouche noted, "especially Felix 'The Fascist' Rohatyn. I don't know why more people don't have the guts to just call it for what it is: straight-out fascism. Maybe they are just afraid the American people will, sooner or later, greet them with pitch-forks.''
http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/09/23/larouche-straight-out-fascism.html
September 24, 2008 6:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the separate clarification. I mentioned the same thing in Mark Lazen's otherwise excellent post yesterday.
This is straight-up fascism.
September 24, 2008 6:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
My point is you can't have it both ways. Either the government are the fascists or the corporations are. Lyndon Larouce? Surely, you jest. In spite of the hysterical ranting around the echo chamber, democracy is still working. McCain suggested calling off a debate, not the election. This is not the first time that America has responded to a breakdown in some market. We have always found a socialist solution, not a fascist one. You people continue to amaze me. McCain is demanding bi-partisan control of the bailout and you villify him for it. You are either very young or very disingenuous.
September 25, 2008 7:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Excuse me, but what the fuck are you talking about?
I will just assume you replied to the wrong person.
September 25, 2008 6:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lyndon LaRouch is called "lunatic fringe" because he is a lunatic on the far-right fringe.
Poltically neophytes are more advanced in their naivete than the juveniles who actually fall for the transparently foolish screeds by such as LaRouche and John Birch Society.
It is especially foolish when "lefties" swallow what are extreme RIGHT-wing propagandas.
September 24, 2008 7:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
The right has fascist aspirations, but this latest snafu is unraveling the whole thing. The Texas mafia wanted one more bite of the apple and Congress, even on the Right, is growing a set. But let's see how this plays out after Cheney has his closed door discussions with the Republikans. If he changes their minds, then we will have lost our democracy. We still do not know what the October surprise will be. I shudder when I consider what they might do because their ambitions has no limit and the laws have not been applied to them.
September 24, 2008 7:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
This IS the October surprise.
September 25, 2008 8:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's McCain who is going to deliver the Republicans in Congress, not Cheney. That's why McCain is going back to Washington. To "save the day" and emerge in triumph. How easy it is to forget that we are still running against Bush and Rove. McCain calls for a Washington meeting, Obama hesitates long enough for Bush to order him back to Washington.
Don't forget. McCain is running as the guy who puts his country above his political ambitions. He has been characterizing Obama as the guy who would rather lose a war than lose the election. Now McCain can characterize Obama as the guy who would rather see the financial system collapse then lose the election.
September 25, 2008 8:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Corporate America exerts tremendous influence on the government but it's the government that drafts, debates, and passes legislation in the guise of "democracy." It was some Bertram Gross who coined the term "Friendly Fascism" with an excellent book of that title back in 1980. "Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades." Now, twenty-eight years later, we see what they've evolved to in the faces of Hank Paulson an Ben Bernanke and all the vermin they represent.
Now that I've read a comment from the LaRouche-ites above I think my computer has a virus on it. Damn! I didn't expect to get infected with this on TPM.
By the way, if you want to check out some more looney-tunes analysis from an erstwhile lefty, take a peek at Counterpunch.org. Those folks are circling right back through the LaRouche cauldrin!
September 24, 2008 7:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Corporations are fascist? What's going on with the financial "bailout" is fascist? No. Instead of flittering around with terminology you seem to know nothing about, I suggest you put pen down (and keyboard away) and do some reading.
We live in a capitalist society. In a capitalist society, as Marx pointed out long ago, the executive of the state (political) serves as the executive committee of the capitalist class as a whole (liberal Juan Cole even made this point yesterday). That's all consistent with what's going on currently and, as far as I can tell, the U.S. government's capitalist democratic forms and substance are the same this week as they were last week. What's different this week is how rapidly various ideologically-based capitalist economic theories have dissolved into thin air in the face of needing to save the system's hide.
Fascism, historically speaking, is a mass paramilitary movement of sections of the middle "class" in defense of capitalism, typically stoked and supported by rightist sections of big capital. It aims to crush the trouble makers - labor, the left and liberals - who are perceived as causing society-wide disorder. The idea is "make the trains run on time." There is no such movement of note right now because the crisis is at this point of a fundamentally different kind. What we have here is a typical crisis of overproduction (housing), stoked into a gigantic worldwide credit crisis by the coincidence of low interest rates, widespread shady capitalist financial practices, and increasingly large U.S. government debt (need for credit) primarily because of the Iraq war. If the crisis were to continue to deepen and be prolonged for some time without finding some modicum of order, then we would no doubt see the growth of a fascist movement in the U.S., as well as in some other countries. But corporations = fascism? It sounds like you haven't worked for one.
September 25, 2008 1:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for your comment. My point in referring to corporations as fascist (perhaps totalitarian is more apt) is that they wield an enormous amount of power in the government and through their decisions that are not accountable to the general public who bear the brunt of those decisions. The influence they have on the government decision-making process is unmatched by any other group. And they have an influence on the lives of Americans in which they are often not (and cannot be) held to account except through the government. I did not mean to imply that corporations run internally as fascist organizations.
The corporate-government partnership that I see as evident is furthered by this bailout in which the Bush Administration is attempting to subvert all Congressional and judicial oversight. In other words, the Bush proposal to bail out these corporations is an attempt to exercise as much power without any accountability as it can, all based on taxpayer funds. Again, perhaps I should have used the word 'totalitarian' instead, but Mussolini's quote resonated with me. That was my purpose.
September 25, 2008 7:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, what's happened to your argument is it seems to have degenerated into a kind of let's call what we don't like fascism. If the label doesn't seem to fit, we'll come up with a new definition for "fascism" that does.
Exactly whose opinion and voice do you think is being repressed, for example? Stop throwing around themes like fascism and racism unless you can prove they fit. Those themes may feed red meat to the echo chamber, but they don't add much to our understanding of what's going on in the real world.
September 25, 2008 8:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly whose opinion and voice do you think is being repressed, for example?
The folks who work for those companies on the bottom rungs, for example. They have no choice in the company's decisions that drive the economy into the ground. They have to follow orders or they're out of a job. In this case, they're out of a job anyway. Same happened with Enron and company.
Meanwhile, those companies helped write the legislation that allowed them to do this because of their power and influence on the government. They campaigned for less oversight and got it.
They also campaign for free investment (not free trade) in foreign nations and the government pushes for it, regardless of the human consequences. This is what NAFTA was. So a company, which by the way has more rights given to it than any single human being could ever hope to have, can move overseas, be protected by US law (try that as a US citizen), employ workers at a fraction of the cost of American workers and subject them to horrendous working conditions which supposedly saves more money, and no worker on either side has any say in the matter. It's just what they have to live with. Meanwhile, the government touts this as an achievement in progress and freedom.
September 25, 2008 11:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, that sounds like a good description of corporate jobs anywhere in the world. Corporations aren't political parties. I'm asking you when you saw dissent being suppressed. Seems to me we still have freedom of speech. Bill of Rights still intact, etc. Make your case.
September 25, 2008 11:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
Absolutely we still have dissent intact. I never argued otherwise. In my post I stated at the end that we're on the verge of something very dangerous. Luckily, we are still the most free people in the world when it comes to freedom of speech. Avoiding that something dangerous depends on whether the people - not the government - will let it happen. The government will do what it wants unless impelled to do otherwise by popular movements.
Bill of Rights still intact? So far. This administration has worked hard to slowly tear pieces of it down in the name of security.
And our elected representatives are being told by the Bush Administration that it should have no oversight whatever when it comes to this corporate bailout, a prime subversion of the balance of power and checks and balances implicit in our system. Hell, Dick Cheney doesn't even believe he is part of any one particular branch of government and therefore doesn't really have to answer to anyone. As far as I know, that position is unprecedented in American government, at least when it comes to publicly articulating it so brazenly as he did.
You're absolutely right. Corporations aren't political parties. I fear they hold more power than do political parties. And they are only answerable to their shareholders, with no responsibility but to make money. This is precisely why I shudder at the kind of power they hold in Washington and the nature of this bailout. They are not accountable to the public, yet the government is giving them public funds and no doubt the profits that stem from those funds will be privatized immediately.
September 25, 2008 11:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
He is saying that corporate control over the levers of power in Washington is fascism. You describe the end result of a fascist state, but it doesn't start out that way.
It is more subtle, invasive, like a virus or a cancer.
It's not the corporations who are fascist - it is the system that meets that definition, of which corporations are a part. Corporate CEOs leave to and go into government and then back out again to take over their old companies. They fund think tanks and create policy. They meet with our representatives behind closed doors to discuss how they are going to screw us.
It is an incestuous dance of zero accountability, privatized profits and nationalized losses. It is 21st Century Fascism and it is all perfectly legal because most of the people who were supposed to look out for us fell asleep on the job.
The blog seemed pretty clear to me.
September 25, 2008 7:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Post a Comment