Was the Bush Administration Fascist?

Okay then, let's hear your own definition of fascism and why Bush doesn't compare. Or let's just see your definiton of fascism. We can talk about 9/11 and the Russians or Iraq or pick on each other some other time to your heart's content. Fair enough?

I mean,

if we're going to try and indict Bush as a fascist then it only seems fair that he have someone that would put up a rigorous defense on his behalf. Everyone should have a fair trial right?

So what is your definition of fascism?

 

Please excuse my good friend NS Ivon he gets so obsessed with truthers and they're bringing up things that might be negative to the great leader's image he can't help but dive head first into points seven, nine and eleven. :smilewinkgrin:

 

Lots of people during the 90's were urging that Saddam be removed from power. President Clinton's own wife was one of them.

Yes, the old standby Page 51. But nowhere in that document do the writers speak of invading Iraq, and the Pearl Harbor reference is regarding support for Rebuilding America's Defenses, as the title of the essay aptly states.

 

Well Poncho, you should thank me for being so cooperative. Consider: I have accepted your 14 point characteristics of a fascist regime as reasonably descriptive, and I haven't quibbled over them at all. I have read them and noted that they do not describe the Bush administration nearly as well as they describe modern day Russia.

Free market dynamics and corporate ownership are much stronger in the US than Russia. Authoritarian government and militarism recieve much more support in Russia than they do here. The population revels in Putin's iron rule, and are excited by Russian military adventures. Putin has a much stronger grip on the media than Bush does. The press here became very excited when they found evidence that our military was trying to...wait for it...get their side of the story out! Cronyism is thriving in Russia, with all of Putin's friends and former KGB officers in charge of Gazprom and the government, while the US press writes 1000's of articles pointing out that Vice President Cheney was once chairman of Halliburton. Rigged elections? Putin has crushed all political opposition, but in the US we have endless recounts if someone has sour grapes over election results.

So using the lists that you have posted, the US is a very weak model of a fascist state, and we have a real-life example of one that corresponds to the list much better. It seems a waste of your time to try to make that shoe fit, especially since the Daily Kos and Rockwell types have already put so much effort into it. But I'm not one to stifle intellectual inquiry.

 

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It's good to see that your not one to stifle intellectual inquiry,but have you taken any time to look into the matter? Have you or are you inclined to search fotr the truth? If so ,and before you totaly discount what I'm about to say please watch the movie ( a documentary) called "The Birth of Treason" It gives MUCH documentation on 9-11 but please don't throw away your mind by making it up before you search for the truth for youself. Don't believe me ,look at the facts and make up your own mind. But do it prayerfully I have and it was a hard pill to swallow.
I asked God to show me the truth and claimed Jerimiah 33:3 In doing so." Call unto me and I will answer thee,and show you great and mighty things that thou knowest not."

 

You haven't even seen my comparison of Bush/fascism and already you're trying hard to change the subject, deflect criticism away from "the great leader" and demonize "the opposition".

You have been very cooperative and informative I must admit in that you have once again illustrated the proper (?) usage of points *five, seven, nine and eleven* for us.

NS, if you were brainwashed...would you know it? :laugh:

** See "the list".

 

Oh I thought you had already started. Alright, well have fun.

 

No. If one is to compare fascism to the Bush administration it only seems reasonable that a good understanding and definition of fascism is required first.

There seemed to be some confusion over it in the begining of this thread. The standard "wikipedia" definitions imo leave a whole lot to be desired. One of the best explanations I've run across in my "study" was written by Colombia University Professor Robert Paxton in his book "The Anatomy of Fascism." (paraphrased) it reads something like this...

Fascism = emotional lava which contains;

1. A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions.

2. Belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits.

3. Need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts.

4. Right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint.

5. Fear of foreign "contamination."

Fascism demands;

A succession of wars, foreign conquests, and national threats to keep the nation in a state of fear, anxiety and patriotic hypertension.

Those who disagree are branded ideological traitors.

All successful fascist regimes, allied themselves to traditional conservative parties, and to the military-industrial complex.

All I've been doing so far is trying to establish an understanding of fascism and reveal it's attributes beyond the cookie cutter definitions. Any similarities between fascist regimes and the Bush administration up to this point are purely coincidental. :smilewinkgrin:

 

1. Merger of corporate and government power. (corporatism)

The fundamental essence of corporatism is not technocratic but moral: what does government have the responsibility to do? What do people have the right to demand be done for them?

The economic Left likes corporatism for three reasons:

1. It satisfies its lust for power.
2. It makes possible attempts to redistribute income.
3. It enables them to practice #2 while remaining personally affluent.

The economic Right likes corporatism for three different reasons:

1. It enables them to realize capitalist profits while unloading some of the costs and risks onto the state.
2. The ability to intertwine government and business enables them to shape government policy to their liking.
3. They believe the corporatist state can deliver social peace and minimize costly disruptions.

<snip>

Let's look at some specific examples of corporatism:

1. The Export-Import Bank. This government agency helps finance exports of American products. The aim, laudable enough, is to create jobs in the US. But there is still the problem that doing this requires the government to consume capital, which might have created more jobs, (or just more wealth) if it had been allocated elsewhere. So this is classic corporatism: government allocating capital to private industry on the basis of political favoritism.

2. Agricultural price-supports. Contrary to myth, most of the money goes to agribusiness, not small farmers.

3. Industrial bailouts, like the recent one of the airlines. People do not trust the market to provide the airline service they think they "need." The truth is this country has more carriers than the market can support and a few should be allowed to die. No-one who really believes in free-market economics accepts the argument that jobs can be saved in the long run in this fashion.

4. Corporate bankruptcy law. This law assigns an artificial value, not supported by economics, to keeping dying companies alive, rather than letting the carcasses of competition's losers nourish the winners. It is responsible, for example, for preventing a needed cull of the airline business by letting Continental Airlines pass through its protections not once but twice.

5.Tariffs, quotas, and other trade restrictions. These transfer wealth from consumers to producers in the affected industries, whatever their other possible merits.

6. Affirmative action is generally viewed as a social-policy question rather than an economic-policy one, but it fits neatly into the corporatist model: government forces private industry to distribute jobs to a favored political constituency. If people really believed in markets, they would realize that irrational discrimination imposes a cost on employers, who therefore already have an incentive not to engage in it.

7. Fannie Mae, the government agency which raises money for mortgage loans in the private capital markets. This agency has deliberately been spinning out loans to sub-par borrowers who are doomed to default on them. It has become a major prop holding up real-estate prices, and is thus a key culprit in the ongoing mortgage bubble. Conservatives accept it on the grounds that home ownership makes people more conservative. But this may not be true forever if private ownership of housing becomes a public entitlement. This is part of an ongoing phenomenon that corporatism helps to drive: the erosion of the determination of political preferences by the ownership of property

8. Sallie Mae, the government agency which supervises student loans. The government has a system of directly-financed public universities, but is has also in effect annexed private universities. Cleverly, it uses a relatively small amount of public money to package the flow of a much larger amount of private capital to tuition. The principal problem with this is that it has become a subsidy machine for the spiraling cost of higher education. There is also the problem that any institution receiving federal funds becomes susceptible to regulations that otherwise wouldn't be legal. Bribes-if-you-do are a much less disruptive means of manipulating behavior than sanctions-if-you-don't, and corporatism hates disruption and loves business as usual

9. In local government, corporatism is principally a matter of real estate. Let's take New York as an example, just because I know it best and the pattern is clearest here, though similar dynamics work in other locales to a greater or lesser degree. Basically, real estate development here has become so over-regulated and over-taxed that it is virtually impossible to do profitably without government help. Government is aware that it has strangled development, but still wants it to occur because voters want jobs, campaign contributors want their projects, and projects create patronage opportunities for politicians. Therefore, government selectively lifts the burden of taxation and regulation on certain projects to push them into the black. It does this with tax abatements, loan guarantees, zoning changes, condemnations, outright subsidies, tax-exempt bond issues, exemption from regulations, and selective public infrastructure investments. As a result, only projects with political support can happen, and every skyscraper is a monument to the political deals that enabled it to get built. The result is capitalist in the sense of being privately owned, but it is not a free market. Government is expected by developers to keep a steady flow of profits going (while keeping politically-unconnected competitors out of the game.) It is expected by construction unions to keep a steady flow of construction jobs. It is expected by the public to deliver shiny new skyscrapers full of jobs.

10. In science and technology, corporatism principally takes the form of federal government financing of research expenditures whose value is difficult for the private sector to capture on its own. Government pays for universities to provide industry with the raw feedstock of new discoveries that can be commercialized. State governments have entered this game on a lesser scale. Tax credits for research and development may also be interpreted as a public subsidy.

11. In the capital markets, the quintessential corporatist institution is the Federal Reserve Bank. Legally, it is not technically a government agency at all but a cartel of private banks. Prior to 1913, the maintenance of a viable capital market in the U.S. was not a government responsibility.5 From the 30's to the 70's, the Fed tried to institute the grand corporatist project of Keynesianism, but abandoned it when inflation proved it unworkable. Nevertheless, the responsibilities of the Fed have tended to grow as people expect it, for example, to bail out a falling stock market with cheap credit, as I have mentioned before.

12. Bankers are quite well aware that they can make speculative loans to financially weak nations and count on being bailed out by the government if anything goes wrong. Naturally, this creates a moral hazard, not to mention a misallocation of capital. But given that the Left wants to see capital allocated to the Third World, the Right wants banks to be profitable, and the public fears a crash, the bankers can always count on a bailout.

SOURCE...

Which came first...American corporatism or George Walker Bush and the neocons?

 

(bump) Look forward to reading the next installment

 

May take a few days. Lots of names and bios to look at for this next one. :type:

 

But in the meantime you can read this.


First published in 1899, republished for the first time in 100 years! The Coming Battle documents from congressional records, newspaper reports and writings by the founding fathers and others a chronology of events long forgotten that shaped our fledgling nation from 1776 to 1899. Read about the manipulation of our money and its supply, the intentional creation of recessions, depressions and panics. The manipulation of the stock markets. The demonetization of silver. A breathtaking history told in the words of a contemporary witness to these events. [1]

THE COMING BATTLE

BY
M. W. WALBERT


INTRODUCTION.


In this volume the author endeavors to give an accurate history of the present National Bank System of currency, including an account of the first United States Bank,- both of which were borrowed from Great Britain by those statesmen who, like the father of Sir Robert Peel, believed that a national debt was the source of prosperity.

It is believed that the facts adduced in the following pages will be productive of some good, in pointing out the immense evils lurking in that system of banking, a system which has produced panics at will, and which is the active abettor of the stock gamblers, railroad wreckers, and those industrial tyrants of modern times, the enormously overcapitalized and oppressive trusts.

It is sought to point out the great dangers of delegating purely government powers to these greedy monopolists, by which they are enabled to organize a money trust, far more tyrannical than all the other combinations now in existence; and by which they absolutely defy the authority that endowed them with corporate life.

The issue between these banks and the people will be joined in the near future, and the greatest struggle the world ever witnessed will take place between the usurping banks on the one hand and the people on the other.

In the nature of things, unjustly acquired power of man over man generally rises to such heights of arrogance, as to eventually create a public opinion that will grind tyranny of every form to atoms, hence, The Coming Battle that will surely take place in the near future and the victory that will be won by justice will be the noblest events in American history.

The Author.

Read The Book Click Here. Buy The Book Click Here.

 

You are hawking a book suggested by the CT website that also says:

Source: http://www.apfn.org/apfn.htm

Or how about this jewel:

Source: http://www.apfn.org/apfn/flight77.htm

 

Yeah? So what's your point? Are you saying that because this book is being sold by a website that you consider questionable the information contained in the book is not worth the price in the other link? FREE? I used this site because it had what I considered a decent sales pitch for a book.

I could have wrote out a pretty decent sales pitch myself but I'm not making any money from the sales of this book so why waste time and energy on it when I can just link to site a that already has a decent one?

This book was written before a standardized word was even made up for people who question the establishment. Sheesh. If you don't want to buy it or read it then don't.

What do you think of my definition of fascism? Have I covered everything? Have I provided enough links? Is there any comments you'd like to make on any of the points? Have I covered corporatism well enough? Can you feel the heat from all the "emotional lava" flowing around us yet?

More information on international banking.

Global Banking: The Bank for International Settlements

Global Banking: The International Monetary Fund

Global Banking: The World Bank

Is this corporatism?

BTW, have you read David Ray Griffin's book? Or G. Edward Griffin's book

The Creature from Jekyll Island.?

 

Poncho , I think this is an important thread

Now you might think Naomi Wolf is a progressive but I do not think she is gullible, submitted for your approval, Poncho:thumbs:

Naomi Wolf :The Battle Plan



The following is the introduction to Naomi Wolf's new book, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

The summer before last, I traveled across the country talking about threats to our liberty. I spoke and listened to groups of Americans from all walks of life. They told me new and always harsher stories of state coercion.

What I had called a "fascist shift" in the United States, projections I had warned about as worst-case scenarios, was now surpassing my imagination: in 2008, thousands of terrified, shackled illegal immigrants were rounded up in the mass arrests which always characterize a closing society; news emerged that the 9/11 report had been based on evidence derived from the testimonies of prisoners who had been tortured -- and the tapes that documented their torture were missing -- leading the commissioners of the report publicly to disavow their own findings; the Associated Press reported that the torture of prisoners in U.S.-held facilities had not been the work of "a few bad apples" but had been directed out of the White House; the TSA "watch list," which had contained 45,000 names when I wrote my last book, ballooned to 755,000 names and 20,000 were being added every month; Scott McClellan confirmed that the drive to war in Iraq had been based on administration lies; HR 1955, legislation that would criminalize certain kinds of political thought and speech, passed the House and made it to the Senate; Blackwater, a violent paramilitary force not answerable to the people, established presences in Illinois and North Carolina and sought to get into border patrol activity in San Diego.

The White House has established, no matter who leads the nation in the future, U.S. government spying on the emails and phone calls of Americans -- a permanent violation of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. The last step of the ten steps to a closed society is the subversion of the rule of law. That is happening now. What critics have called a "paper coup" has already taken place.

Yes, the situation is dire. But history shows that when an army of citizens, supported by even a vestige of civil society, believes in liberty -- in the psychological space that is "America" -- no power on earth can ultimately suppress them.

Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies." Understood in this light, "America" -- the state of freedom that is under attack -- is first of all a place in the mind. That is what we must regain now to fight back.

The two societies make up two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped. People around the world understand that this kind of inner experience is as toxic an environment as is a polluted waterway they are forced to drink from; it is as insufficient a space as being compelled to sleep in a one-room hut with seven other bodies on the floor.

In contrast, the consciousness of freedom -- the psychology of freedom that is "America" -- is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. "Everything," wrote Denis Diderot, who influenced, via Thomas Jefferson, the Revolutionary generation, "must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection." Jefferson wrote that American universities are "based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." Since this state of mind is self-trusting, it builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect. "Your own reason," wrote Jefferson to his nephew, "is the only oracle given you by heaven, and you are answerable not for the rightness but the uprightness of the decision."

After my cross-country journey, I realized that I needed to go back and read about the original Revolutionaries of our nation. I realized in a new way from them that liberty is not a set of laws or a system of government; it is not a nation or a species of patriotism. Liberty is a state of mind before it is anything else. You can have a nation of wealth and power, but without this state of mind -- this psychological "America" -- you are living in a deadening consciousness; with this state of mind, you can be in a darkened cell waiting for your torturer to arrive and yet inhabit a chainless space as wide as the sky.

"America," too, is a state of mind. "Being an American" is a set of attitudes and actions, not a nationality or a posture of reflexive loyalty. This tribe of true "Americans" consists of people who have crossed a personal Rubicon of a specific kind and can no longer be satisfied with anything less than absolute liberty.

 

There have been several officially facist regimes in the world--Argentina under Peron, Spain under Franco, Occupied France under Leval, and of course Italy and Germany. One could easily argue that Junta-led Japan in WW 2 was Facist, and Communist Russia and China under Stalin and Mao were essentially facist, as was Iraq under Saddam. Here are the tell-tale signs of facism:

1. Freedom of the press, assembly, speech, and association are outlawed.

2. Political opponents are killed

3. The secret police arrest citizens for trying to exercise (1) above.

4. The leader does not submit to free elections.

5. The opposition in parliament is systematically eliminated by co-option, forced "retirement", intimidation, and murder.

6. There is no real opposition to any law the Leader wants to pass

7. The government rounds up guns

8. There is a large paramilitary force which enforces political discipline.

9. Political opponents "disappear" to never be seen again.

10. Camps and detention centers fill up, not with enemy comatants and terroist suspects, but with citizens arrested for political reasons.


If a student of mine wrote in a paper that ANY American presidential regime were facist (including Lincoln and LBJ, who had more power tendencies than GW by far) I would have them re-do the paper unless they could come up with definite proof about the above.

 

The American Revolution (and revolutionaries) was not any kind of class struggle, it was a fight over who would rule, the British King and Parliament, or individual American states. After this loose confederation won the revolution, it did not take them long to figure out that they needed a real government, and the Articles of Confederation were not going to hack it.

Most of our founding revolutionaries were men of wealth and influence--Madison, Jefferson, Hancock, etc. Washington was the richest man in America (picture Bill Gates in uniform! But, then Washington was 6'4 and strong). They were revolting against a series of British parliamentary governments who were trying to fix their budget. Their ham-handedness had single-handedly, in the years 1763 to 1775 (before a shot was fired, said John Adams) made one mistake after another in alienating the colonists, who went from being British in 1763 and proud of it, to being Americans in 1775.

The common people fought in the Revolutionary armies because they had a stake. The only place in the world where a common worker could aspire to own a bit of land and be his own man was here in the US. There is no overarching concept here, no grand ideology, no great single idea except one--to have a place to live and work and raise kids so that they can to the same thing. That is why the mortgage mess and the credit crunch is so fundamentally scary to Americans--we want to own our field where se can sit in the shade of our fig tree and vine, and where we can own the land they are on.

 

Ya gotta start somewhere. The Wiemar republic wasn't always a fascist dictatorship. It morphed into one after certain steps were taken to go from one state to the other. Basically all anyone has to do is compare Germany's history with what the neocons have done since taking power.

All the laws are in place already to make one right fine dictatorship. All it would take is another "pearl harbor type event" like a stock market crash or that big terrorist attack like the one they keep telling us "isn't a matter of if but when". Then you'd have your martial law police state like you've described. Fascism is more like a spiritual journey you take to arrive at the dictatorship.