The Tea Party and the Fascist Impulse

True, people toss around the term fascism without care. Hopefully this post isn't another such case.

An essay, Global Capitalism versus Global Community, by Walden Bello, begins with some historical background. He talks about unbridled capitalism's rise "in what is now known as the first age of globalization that spanned the ninteenth century and ended with World War I in 1914." It included the late 1800s Robber Barron era.

This "first age of globalization" saw "the emergence of sharp disparities in the distribution of income and assets." Bello then notes that this "provoked a countervailing push from society, especially the lower and middle classes" to re-balance the inequities. This is where my insight begins.

At first I didn't understand why Bellow didn't define the "first age" to continue through the 1920s to the Great Crash. Then I realized that his cut-off point it's central to my insight: The rise of NAZIs between the two world wars.

We on the left like to think of the "countervailing push" to re-balancing the inequities caused by unfettered capitalism to be solely our domain; it's the little people reasserting their say in the socio-economic system, asserting public freedom over excessive private freedom. But Bellos reminded me that this isn't the way it really works.

... not all of the responses to globalization were progressive. For example, fascism, which Karl Polanyi defined as "the reform of the market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions," was also part of this countervailing drive, one that hijacked the search for community in the service of reaction, counterrevolution and racism.

Yes. The "first age of globalization" does find a break-point at World War I, after which Hitler found a desperate populace that was itself hijacked in his service. The "little people" were swept up in the fascist "countervailing push".

It's a similar strata of today's society that has an impulse to follow the Tea Party movement. Now they are following the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Tom Delay, all of whom are very pro-corporation, like Hitler and Mussolini the later of which who said, in Italian of course:

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

The conundrum of the Tea Party, being against the establishment, but for the corporate system, now makes more sense. But it is a bad omen, particularly when one considers another definition of fascism by FDR:

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Sources:

First posted on Challenge the Establishment blog.

Is this Corporate Fascism?

According to Matt Taibbi's Must Read article, as a result of the financial stabilization process the federal government has been turned

into one gigantic, half-opaque holding company, one whose balance sheet includes the world's most appallingly large and risky hedge fund, a controlling stake in a dying insurance giant, huge investments in a group of teetering megabanks, and shares here and there in various auto-finance companies, student loans, and other failing businesses. Like AIG, this new federal holding company is a firm that has no mechanism for auditing itself and is run by leaders who have very little grasp of the daily operations of its disparate subsidiary operations.

But who owns who? Some people say that the government is nationalizing the banks. To me it looks like the banks have privatized the US government to meet their cash flow needs. Being too big to fail and too complex to untangle, US government, and it's tax-payer assets, is now effectively owned by the mega-financial institutions. The government allows the continued employment of the people who caused this mess, because these are some of the few people on the planet who understand how to untangle the web of shaky financial instruments they've created. The government seems powerless to reverse this relationship.

Tell me we the tax payer are not on the hook to stabilize these corporations, and I'll reverse my statement about the US government being privatized .... I'm afraid the die has been cast. So, that leads to an unnerving conclusion.

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Lets not tolerate it.

Psssst... Do Something

• Contact the Broadcast Media
  
• Contact the Newspapers
  
• Contact the US Senate
  
• Contact the House of Representatives

When in times of human events...

We are facing a "When in times of human events" moment. The present current "form of government" has "become destructive" of "deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the governed". In cases like this, which are not light and transient causes, "It is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." Alter significantly we must.

Many actions of the Bush administration are intentionally designed to be nearly irreversible. Consider the appointment of partisan operatives to the judicial bench, driving the treasury into debt as a means of weakening federal agencies that protect the environment and the rights of the common people, shifting our national treasure and power to transnational corporations that are in alliance with the Bush administration. The Congress is similarly captured by the influence of the consolidated wealth leaving them impotent to reverse course.

Our nation has become corrupted by an small elite class of people, some operatives and some are simply lucky relatives going along for the ride, probably oblivious to the crimes being committed as they live in luxury, traveling freely and enjoying all the best that money can buy. They do this in the face of a failing empire, which can no longer hold the index finger high and say "USA, We're #1".

The following rankings are evidence of US decline in the world:

• Number 37 on the Healthcare Quality Index (World Health Organization).
  
• Number 32 in infant mortality rate (Save the Children).
  
• Both of which are a result is number 29 on life expectancy.
  
• Number 9 on Adult Literacy Scale (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)).
  
• Number 12 on student reading ability (OECD).
  
• Number 48 on the Journalistic Press Freedom Index (Reporters Without Boarders).
  
• Number 17 on women's rights (World Economic Forum).
  
• Number 13 on a quality of life survey by Economist magazine.
  
• Number 45 on the Environmental Sustainability Index (Yale and Columbia universities).
  

Reversing this corrupt course is no light and transient cause. Our inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are threatened by increasing evidence of a tightening police state. Consolidated corporate power, including the mass media, is used by a small group of people who enter and exit the government at will to secure largess for themselves and their adherents. This intertwining of corporate and unitary executive power, used to consolidate ever more power, is a hallmark of fascism; Actually, fascism isn't an "ism." It doesn't push a doctrine. It does anything necessary to expand its power, even if that means pretending to promote a doctrine. Fascism is by its nature corrupt.

The situation is reaching a tipping point, evidenced by the revelations of Ron Suskind that the Bush administration ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to forge a letter linking Iraq to 9/11 and the CIA's compliance. The CIA crossed a bright legal line when it used the forged Habbush letter to influence domestic opinion; the CIA is strictly limited to foreign intelligence matters. This restriction is a keystone to the freedoms of democracy we hold so dear.

Will the people of the United States simply accept this blatant abuse of power, which was intentionally targeted at them by the Bush administration? The Declaration of Independence says:

all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

It also says,
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

Yes. We are living one of those When in times of human events moments.

Sources:

Statistics on American rankings are from page 244 of "The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder," Vincent Bugliosi, Vangaurd Press, 2008.

Citigroup and Citibank in Bailout Mode

Citigroup's crisis is a reflection of the United States and the world. Inside-crowd capitalism, allowed to run rampant by Republicrat policies, need an inside fix.

Imagine if you could take out a loan, buy stocks or other on-paper investments with the loan, later sell the stocks, pay off the loan and keep the profit. Better yet, imagine if you had a bank, could give yourself a loan, and do the same thing for yourself and "clients," for a fee in addition to the interest on the loan. What a way to game the system. Can't be legal, can it? Actually, this is what Citibank and Citigroup have been doing.

The Glass-Steagall Act, following the 1929 stock market crash, separated investment banks (Citigroup) and commercial banks (Citibank) making this type of thing illegal. In 1987, banking laws (Section 20) were changed to allow commercial banks to have subsidiaries that could offer investment services. This, in part, precipitated a massive consolidation of banks in the late 1990s, though the mergers were world wide.

Between 1990 and 1998, the number [of bank mergers] averaged about 510 per year compared with 345 per year over the 1980--89 period. As a result of this activity, the number of banks operating in the U.S. has declined about 30 percent since 1990. [LINK]

An indication of the severity of the home mortgage liquidity crisis we're in was a further bending of the rules for Citibank/group by federal regulators in August 2007. At the time, one had to wonder if that would be enough to bail out this scheme. Apparently it wasn't.

As an indication of the inside-crowd capitalism, we're reminded that Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is the Citigroup executive committee chairman. Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is on the Citigroup executive committee as Citigroup's biggest individual shareholder. Where do people get off bashing Michael Moore for exposing Saudi influence over US policy? True conservatives know that Moore is speaking truth to power.

I'm reminded of the quote by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini:

Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

Update:

From our libertarian friends, Gary North in particular, we hear the following:

The new CEO of Citigroup, America's largest bank, is a former Goldman Sachs co-chairman and a former Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin. Goldman Sachs has made record profits in recent months. How? By selling short the subprime mortgage bond market.

Sources:

Associated Press, Report: Citigroup CEO Will Offer to Resign Sunday; Board Expected to Hold Emergency Meeting, November 2, 2007.

Two Kinds of Experts, or "The CEO Formerly Known as Prince," Gary North, November 8, 2007, LewRockwell.com.