PAGE 2
THE RISE OF FASCISM IN AMERICA
Just four conglomerates, which have oh so much in common
with one another, produce (for profit) virtually every newspaper,
magazine, major internet site, movie, television program, CD,
DVD, and so on. The pressure to stay within fairly narrow
bounds of covering and the fear of losing one’s job should one
“think outside the box" is detailed succinctly in Danny Schecter's
March 27, 2006 column, the title of which is taken from a line
Edward R. Morrow mutters in the movie Good Night and Good
Luck: “The Fear is in the Room: Inside Our Unbrave Media
World”; Robert Fisk’s March 19 column, “The Farcical End of the
American Dream”; and Bill Gallagher’s March 28 column, “There
is No 'Good News’ in Iraq.”
To note one other example: If Wal-Mart were a country it
would have the 19th largest economy in the world!
ROGER HAYES
BY GARY ALAN SCOTT
Fascism in America won’t come with jackboots, book
burnings, mass rallies, and fevered harangues, nor will it come
with black helicopters or tanks in the street. It won’t come like
a storm — but as a break in the weather, that sudden change
o f season you might feel when the wind shifts on an October
evening: Everything is the same, but everything has changed.
Something has gone, departed from the world, and a new reality
will have taken its place. All the old forms will still be there:
legislatures, elections, campaigns — plenty o f bread and
circuses. But “consent o f the governed” will no longer apply;
actual control o f the state will have passed to a small and
privileged group who rule for the benefit o f their wealthy peers
and corporate patrons.
To be sure, there will be factional conflicts among the
elite, and a degree o f debate will be permitted; but no one
outside the privileged circle will be allowed to influence state
policy. Dissidents will be marginalized— usually by “the people"
themselves. Deprived o f historical knowledge by a thoroughly
impoverished educational system designed to produce compla
cent consumers, left ignorant o f current events by a corporate
media devoted solely to profit, many will internalize the force-fed
values o f the ruling elite, and act accordingly. There will be little
need for overt methods o f control.
The rulers will act in secret, for reasons o f “national
security," and the people will not be permitted to know what goes
on in their name. Actions once unthinkable will be accepted as
routine: government by executive fiat, state murder o f “enemies"
selected by the leader, undeclared wars, torture, mass deten
tions without charge, the looting o f the national treasury, the
creation o f huge new “security structures" targeted at the
populace. In time, this will be seen as “normal," as the chill of
autumn feels when summer is gone. It will all seem normal.
Since the 1970s, American businesses have grown
larger and more monopolistic, helped along by deregulation,
the repeal of anti-trust laws, and a steady transformation from
manufacturing to capital management (dare I say, “capital
manipulation’’?). As Paul Bigioni puts it in his excellent essay
entitled The Real Threat o f Fascism: “If we are to protect
ourselves from the growing influence of Big Business, then our
anti-trust laws must be reconceived in a way which recognizes
the political danger of monopolistic conditions."
Bigioni continues by emphasizing that “Anti-trust laws
do not just protect the marketplace, they protect democracy.”
It is well to remember that conditions like these led to fascism
in both Germany and Italy in the 1930s, and Bigioni points out
that the transformation toward fascism occurred in both countries
while they were still liberal democracies. In America, since at
least 1971, the rich have gotten much, much richer and the poor
have become poorer and far more numerous, largely because
our government now sees its primary function as serving the
interests of Big Business and its Big Money. As of 2003,
according to a Congressional Budget Office report, the top
1% of households in America accounted for 57.5% of America's
wealth, up from 38.7% only twelve years earlier. And this does
not take into account the last three years of the Bush tax-cuts.
In the U.S. today, there are 374 billionaires, approximately
25,000 deca-millionaires ($10 million to $999 million) and
2.5 million millionaires; and this does not even take into account
the wealth of corporations! Under such conditions, competition
is minimized or thwarted, and capital is exalted over labor, the
consummation of Marx’s contention that “Capital is dead labor.”
In every industry, huge monopolistic cartels dominate
the playing field, following the spate of mergers and acquisitions
throughout the 1980s and 1990s. To cite just two examples: Four
media giants (AOL-Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert
Murdoch’s News Group) control nearly everything we read, view,
listen to, see at movie houses, and do at entertainment parks.
-CHRIS FLOYD, 11/10/2001
Moscow Times (English edition)
FiI l+ I lt lS I I U I Í I
DESI CM
Do not be hoodwinked by labels here: there was nothing
“socialist” about Hitler’s National Socialist Party, despite his
clever employment of terms such as “volk” (the people or the
folks), “heimat” (homeland), or the solidarity sounding “ein land”
(one country)! Likewise, there is no genuinely human freedom
in the free market, despite the intoxicating rhetoric of neoliberals.
Bigioni quotes Thurman Arnold, head of the Anti-Trust section of
the Justice Department in 1939:
“Germany, o f course, has developed within 15 years
from an industrial autocracy into a dictatorship. Most people are
under the impression that the power o f Hitler was the result o f his
demagogic blandishments and appeals to the mob.. Actually,
Hitler holds his power through the final and inevitable develop
ment o f the uncontrolled tendency to combine in restraint of
trade." And in another address, Arnold told the American Bar
Association that “Germany presents the logical end o f the
process o f cartelization."
And, of course, every cartel needs a strong leader,
a commander-in-chief with an iron fist. Arnold says that Hitler
filled that role, but that if it had not been Hitler, it would have
been someone else. (Americans today might draw an analogy:
if it were not George W. Bush, the first MBA President, who
would serve as the front-man for Big Business, it would be
someone else.) Bigioni writes, “Compulsory slave labor was
the crowning achievement of Nazi labor relations.” By analogy,
Employment-at-Will, the outsourcing of manufacturing and even
service jobs, and the rejection of a living wage, is the crowning
achievement of American labor relations. (See for example
Harold Meyerson’s article, “Three Ideas to Radically Reorder
Economy,” Providence Journal, March 24, 2006, and Princeton
University Professor Alan Binder's article in the March-April issue
of Foreign Affairs.) The disappearance of union jobs, outsourcing
and downsizing has been the crowning achievement of American
business relations over the past thirty years or so. The other
factors contributing to what Bigioni calls “the fascist trajectory”
includes low taxes, various forms of corporate welfare, the
decimation of small businesses, and the ability of corporations
to discharge obligations to employees, to the environment, and
to the country as a whole.
In short, the United States is suffocating from the delet
erious effects of Big Money interests in virtually every arena,
from public political processes to the privatization of much of
what belongs to all of us. Corporate advertising secures the
pernicious effects. From time to time, one hears a call for public
financing of elections, for truth in advertising, and for more
regulation and oversight of lobbying activities, but on the whole,
Americans seem glib about the way things are, supposing that
this is the only way they can be.
The status quo breeds resignation in the citizenry, and
this resignation, too, is in large part an effect of Big Business and
its Big Money. It keeps ordinary folks and their common sense
away from the political arena, which might otherwise force a
change in the way things are done. Big Money does everything
it can to sour people on political participation, so that the little
guys (and ’gals') who just don’t know what’s best for them or
the country will leave matters of governance to the professional
ruling class. To formalize this relatively recent reality, it would
seem necessary to reword our Constitution to reflect those
entities called “corporations,” which have now been deemed
“persons" and whose capital is now regarded as a form of
“speech.” (See, for example, Jeffrey Kaplan, Uncivil Liberties:
ACLU Defense o f Money=Speech Undermines Democracy.)
The United States has become a country “of the corporation,
by the corporation, and for the corporation."
Public financing of elections and campaign expenditure
limits are shouted down as communism or socialism in a manner
very similar to Big Money’s cries of “class warfare” when the
population at large objects to additional giveaways to the richest
few Americans. Big Money (representing a small, elite class)
does everything in its power to prevent the American people
from awakening to the fact that what it is seeing really is class
warfare: warfare that is being waged from the top down, against
the poor and what we used to call the “middle class,” which are
now (involuntarily) subsidizing Big Money interests that control
the political agenda and its legislative processes.
Cannon Beach, O regon
4
<