Fascism!

Bubblehead: Of course you are right as usual. It is comforting to know that Big Brother is still around correcting my excesses and mistakes. I am not being sarcastic.

Fascism, according to Mussolini, one of its greatest proponents, is a marriage of government and corporations. According to other definitions there is a strong dictatorial leader and the state takes precedence over the individual. Since our (criminal) Supreme Court, throwing all precedent and pretences away, proclaimed that corporations were persons and could substitute money for speech, a decision rivaled in idiocy only by the famous Dred Scott decision of l857, we are now well on our way to a full-blown Fascist nation.

It is true we do not as yet have a fully established dictatorship, but it is clear that more and more power has been taken over by the Executive Branch, even to the point of taking us to war without the consent of Congress and even worse, the power to arrest and detain individual citizens indefinitely at the whim of the President. In our evolving Fascism the dictator will be chosen by corporations in collusion with each other and will serve as their representative. While we still pretend to have a democratic system whereby the President is elected by the people, the people are only allowed to vote for one of the two candidates chosen by the corporations. As both political parties are part of this same procedure the differences between them have gradually disappeared and does not matter very much.

This new fascist arrangement is working as planned. Those most in control have obviously decided that Willard Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican candidate to run against President Obama. Exercising their right to spend as much money as possible they have outspent Gingrich in South Carolina and now Florida by as much as four or five to one, denying him the nomination. Romney has received more money for his campaign from the powerful banks that all of the rest of the candidates combined, and Obama is not without their support as well. What we are witnessing is truly the buying of an election.

The issues that characterize the campaigns, whatever they are, are not truly issues that matter much. Corporations don’t care who marries who, who has an abortion, what religion is involved, or even what the unemployment rate is, provided it stays within reasonable limits so as not to impair their enormous profits, and high enough to guarantee the cheapest labor possible. Of course they are opposed to higher taxes (on themselves), Social Security, Medicare, and such because those are issues that bear directly on their potential profits in one way or another. They tolerate food stamps and other such poverty programs only because they have not yet figured out what else to do with the growing surplus populations.

Obviously I could be terribly wrong about this, perhaps they do in some sense feel some responsibility for the poor and the unemployed, maybe they would like ordinary citizens to have more to say about their lives, but this seems to me extremely unlikely. If they did feel that way would they fight anything that even faintly resembles socialism? Would they not be in favor of unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, health care for all, Social Security, food stamps, and other things that would make the lives of ordinary people more pleasant? Would they not recognize there is more to life than profit? They would, but they clearly don’t.

It takes only a moment of reflection to realize that our obscenely bloated and misnamed National Defense Budget is only marginally for national defense and far more importantly to generate unending profits for our Industrial/Military/Political Complex. Similarly, it is pretty obvious that our troops located in bases all around the world are not primarily for national defense, but rather, to protect international corporations that are exploiting resources wherever found, especially at the moment, oil, but many other kinds of businesses as well.

There was no doubt that the Bush/Cheney administration, along with Karl Rove, planned to create a one party nation that would endure forever, and it would have consolidated ultimate power in the Executive Branch of our government. This was to me a truly frightening proposition, but what I believe was even more frightening is that they basically would have used America’s superpower status to impose Fascism all over the world, hence the build-up of our military establishment, the addition of more and more private contractors, and the spreading of bases everywhere. They nearly succeeded in establishing Fascism here in the U.S., I fear the prospect still exists here, but it is doubtful that our once superpower status will ever exist again although some seem to think it still exists. They are going to have a rude awakening.

I will not allow yesterday's success to lull me into today's complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure.

Og Mandino