The United States is not Fascist

[coffin_dodger]

This thread doesn't get nearly enough of an airing these days.

It's a prime example of the double-speak hypocracy posted by self-styled 'anti-fascists' that reside within and amongst the greatest Fascist nation on the planet.

Anyway, cross posted from another thread -

Techno-Fascism (NSA) and the Obama Administration
by NORMAN POLLACK
History is a holistic political-structural process, Marx’s dialectical framework notwithstanding, because even allowing for contradiction there are successive stages of integration, from each of which conflicting tendencies are generated. There is nothing deterministic here, merely the assertion that reality has a unified character, whether or not experiencing social struggle. And in America, regrettably not, upper groups maintaining internal economic-ideological supremacy, beginning, I suspect, from the late-19th century, and progressively tightening its control over society through time up to and including the present. This is not an empty formula that radicals have learned through rote—the experience of gradually shrinking boundaries within which to achieve social change becomes apparent on an almost daily basis, the rapidity of the process now sufficient cause for alarm—yet met with false consciousness below, constant movements toward confrontation and war both to instill among the populace loyalty, consensus, silence, and among upper groups, the impetus for militarism and capitalist expansion (themselves structurally integrated), false consciousness above of another sort: a pathological quest for global dominance of the international system when that system itself no longer fears America.

America in decline, or even in not absolute terms, but rather, within a world system that in power terms is becoming de-centered (a multipolar framework), is losing its way, becoming desperate, striking out at real and imagined enemies (some from the past, as in an anticommunism never put to rest), tempted to manufacture crises as a way of preserving domestic cohesion, paramount for clinging to the unilateral military dominance to which it had been accustomed since World War 2, or at least its symbols if not its substance. Decline is never hospitable ground for democracy, particularly a democracy that requires, as a condition of its functioning, a permanent state of war—where we have been since perhaps the Korean War; and hence, a questionable democracy at best, and since the Bush-Obama years no longer subject to debate. I say, the shrinking boundaries on a daily basis for achieving social change: Therefore, let’s go back several days to three separate signs bearing out the foregoing discussion, all, I believe, interrelated, because rooted in the needs of an American capitalism struggling to protect its hegemonic status on top the global pyramid.

I

In my CounterPunch article, “FBI Authorized Cyberattacks: Further Signs of Unfolding Fascism,” (May 6), we met Hector Monsegur, a true American PATRIOT, as advertised by, and from the standpoint of, the US government, one whom, because the FBI, through harsh threats of criminal prosecution against the hacker group, Anonymous, had been turned (gleefully, it would seem) him into an informer helping to direct the Bureau’s cyberwarfare campaign against foreign governments and corporations. In the USG’s telling, i.e., the federal prosecutor’s drawn indictment to the Court (praising him to the hilt for his cooperation in implicating the other members of the group—Jeffrey Hammond, for one, serving a 10-year sentence), he moves from Patriot to National Hero for the big snitch and tech-savvy assistance in what amounts to highly illegal attacks, not least because obviously stretching the FBI’s actions beyond US boundaries as well as the nature of the espionage (although possibly cleansed through the Patriot Act responsible for still more gross violations of civil liberties and international law).

With this background, we move to last week in illustration of Obama’s full-court press toward incipient if not also actualized fascism. I say “Obama,” because in this case the FBI but more important a discussion to follow on NSA, one finds a direct projection of/from the government; neither one, again, especially NSA, can be dismissed simply as a “rogue” agency, and instead reflect the pith of Administration policy: pursuit of continued global hegemony through solidification, beyond obviously powerful military forces, of a National Security State, a prime requirement being the practice of surveillance at home and abroad. One of the tests of a democratic polity is accountability at the very top—and regrettably America has neither, the lack of the latter testifying to the absence of the former.

Conversely, the situation now worsens, each daily flagrancy, as in the violation and near-destruction of privacy, equally, rule of law, in government’s working toward that end, reveals the deadly metastasizing of American institutions in general, the courts, Congress, ultimately the people: ramifying consequences of cynicism, corruption, and, to be more charitable than the situation warrants, false consciousness, all in the service of ruling groups integrated in the form of financial-industrial-commercial-military elites, with what is now termed the political class (a designation I find, as to its role and independent power, a nifty slogan yet wholly inadequate ) merely their man/maid servants, for an older generation of radicals, then, following Veblen, the Swiss Guards of the Vested Interests, servicing their needs in domestic and foreign policy.

Take the last week in May (let’s skip over the “political class” in favor of the institutionalized structure of power, starting with POTUS in collaboration with the FBI and CIA), here our friend Monsegur (known by the alias “Sabu”), the Guardian (June 1) in its subhead saying it all: “Authorities credit Hector Xavier Monsegur with helping them cripple Anonymous in lenient sentence of time served.” He gets off—the corruption of the courts noted above. Monsegur, the Guardian reports, “who by the US government’s calculations participated in computer hacker attacks on more than 250 public and private entities at a cost of up to $50m in damages, was released from a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday after the judge saluted his ‘extraordinary cooperation’ with the FBI.”

Who is more guilty in this farce, Monsegur, or Loretta Preska, chief judge of the federal district court of the southern district of New York, is a moot question, and, standing behind her, the FBI’s crass practices of intimidation from which the federal court system looks away or actively praises. Monsegur had faced “a maximum sentence according to official guidelines of more than 26 years.” Nope. In pronouncing sentence the judge “repeatedly praised what she called his ‘truly extraordinary cooperation,” providing USG “sophisticated and complex assistance” enabling it “to pierce the secrecy surrounding LutzSec [a UK and US hacker group that had broken away from Anonymous] and successfully prosecute its members.” Informant on others, FBI cyberwarrior par excellence—not a hero, however, to members of Anonymous, which, as one told the Guardian: “Monsegur is, first and foremost a criminal; the FBI’s cyber crime task force are his co-conspirators. While operating under their supervision, Monsegur committed numerous felonies which should in no way be excused due to his protected informant status.”

Well-put, and to me, chalk up another score for fascism, the leading domestic federal law-enforcement agency in the commission of crimes, turning those it prosecutes for criminal punishment into informants in exchange for leniency—while in addition pursuing more sinister ends, to wit, seeking (as does mass surveillance itself) to cow the populace into submission. Here the Anonymous spokesperson is right on target: “The FBI continues to use captured informants, who commit egregious crimes in pursuit of reduced sentences, for the sole purpose of creating ‘examples’ to frighten the public. They do this with the hope of pacifying online dissent and snuffing out journalistic investigations into the US government’s misconduct.” This is what I meant by the metastasizing effects of government policy on behalf of global hegemony and domestic social control, both defining a unified whole. (Hammond, convicted, operated under Monsegur’s direction, “launch[ing] cyber-attacks around the world,” and then sentenced because failing to be turned. In addressing the court, he told Preska: “The government celebrates my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but WHEN WILL THE GOVERNMENT BE MADE TO ANSWER FOR ITS CRIMES?” (my caps.)

Monsegur went on to secure convictions of others. In the court memorandum disclosing how Hammond was caught, an obvious case of entrapment, it becomes clear that Monsegur “had been put at the hub of a vast web of surveillance,” for it was revealed that while he remained in New York, he “’engaged in online chats with Hammond (who was then in Chicago), while coordinating with FBI agents in New York, physical surveillance teams deployed in Chicago, and an electric surveillance unit in Washington DC.’” When in June 2011 the FBI came knocking on his door, “[h]is transformation from a hacker legend into an informant was instantaneous—he agreed to cooperate with the government immediately,” to which, at sentencing, Preska was in fulsome praise, the quickness allowing the FBI to move against LutzSec before its members could be warned. As a UC Hastings law professor (obviously not John Yoo of White House Counsel torture-authorization fame), summarizing Monsegur’s work for the FBI in launching attacks against foreign governments, stated: a sting operation for a crime already in motion was one thing, but it was quite another, “’when you contribute to the creation, inducement and execution of a crime that never was. Particularly when those crimes may very well affect our foreign policy.’” Welcome Team FBI USA, Obama coach-cheerleader, etc.

II

Turning next to the NSA, one sees techno-fascism in full parade-dress, massive surveillance, here, facial recognition data, now combined with practically every other conceivable means of collecting and storing information on Americans—and as much as possible, globally. (Hayden, Alexander, Clapper, the whole leadership crew, past, present, future, listen up: how about the measurement, via forced registration, of men’s private parts—in millimeters, of course, to ensure accuracy in order to intimidate against dissent, facilitate government prosecution, induce apathy toward and complicity with public policy, therefore carrying further the purposes of massive surveillance? Seemingly, no stone can be left unturned in discovering and uprooting subversion.) Here, James Risen and Laura Poitras—both of whom deserve and have earned the respect of those committed to civil liberties—in their New York Times article, “N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces from Web Images,” (May 31), present a breaking story in what one might call a chapter in runaway fascism, particularly odious on top of everything else, including, if I may digress to establish the spirit of government making facial recognition a viable tool of the megalomaniac NSA in its quest to obliterate privacy in world-dimensional terms.

I press for small details to illumine the institutional core of repression, here a societal pattern, if we keep to the short-term, which has been well-established since the enshrinement of Sect. 25 of the Patriot Act (with that Act legitimating so much of government policy, one wonders why any demurral about naming fascism for what it is—the signs, from militarism, to surveillance, to financial-corporate concentration, to xenophobic and ethnocentric mental patterns, all around us and germane to the public acceptance of hegemonic goals). Charlie Savage’s NYT article, “U.S. Seeks to Censor More of Memo That Approved Drone Strike on American,” (May 28), refers both to Obama’s personally authorized assassination of a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki—drone assassination, as I see it, itself a form of, even prime example of, techno-fascism, the pressing of a button halfway around the world to leave a blood spat where a human being once stood—and the white-collar version of techno-fascism of the more routine kind, REDACTION, as a means of protecting government from the charge of, and evidence demonstrating, war crimes. He does not call either, a war crime; emphasis is on cover-up as a general proposition of hiding illegality.

Obama-Holden, the Castor-Pollux of Censorship, have, short of rewriting the Constitution, done all in their power to forestall condemnation for the killing of an American citizen without an indictment, the right to counsel, a jury trial of his/her peers, due process in all its manifold accordance of rights, and instead—no boots on the ground—murder via impersonal technological magic, an Obama favorite, given his usage far exceeding that of his predecessor (metastasizing, in this case, down to the nitty-gritty of conducting warfare, already plagued with atrocities enough). Savage writes: “One week after the Obama administration said it would comply with a federal appeals court ruling ordering it to make public portions of a Justice Department memo that signed off on the targeted killing of a United States citizen, the administration is now asking the court for permission to censor additional passages of the document.” Disgraceful, no, nauseating—why? Not only the stall-tactic, but that the death-authorization was a SECRET MEMO, only seeing the light of day through being forced through an FIA lawsuit. Suppose the memo were allowed to stand, and then gather motion as binding precedent: the killing of citizens, whether on grounds of national security or, say, anticommunism, or counterterrorism, would be standard operating procedure. Hide the memo, it stinks to high heaven!

The designated driver/culprit, the memo’s principal author, fresh from Harvard Law (an ideal soul mate of Obama, who as president of the Law Review had not written an article for it—HLS, what a staggering decline since the days of Holmes and Roscoe Pound), is David Barron, confirmed the week before “to an appeals court judgeship,” what he had been to DOJ Monsegur had been to FBI, complicit through direct involvement in murder. The memo, July 16, 2010, al-Awlaki struck down in Yemen September 2011, it was only the ACLU-NYT suit seeking the memo’s public disclosure that got us this far. Savage: “The Justice Department said it would soon disclose a version of the memo with the additional passages it wants to keep redacted blocked out. It said the additional passages discussed classified fact not legal reasoning.” Classification, the mother of all redactions, has been the handy device behind which the Obama government hides, and the basis for its forays into somewhat clumsy storm-trooper-like attacks on whistleblowers via the Espionage Act. This is truly an embarrassment, if not outright sign of fascism.

In January 2013 a Federal District Court judge “ruled that the government could withhold the memo from the public entirely,” which was overturned this past April by a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (NY), ruling “that the government must make public portions of the memo that lay out legal analysis, though not facts based on classified intelligence.” Even this did not satisfy USG which in a new filing claimed that what “the court had designated for public release contained further information that should be exempt from disclosure.” An assistant US attorney—DOJ at all times up to its neck in fighting disclosure—chastised the higher court, essentially for its stupidity (its decision based on “inadvertence or mistake”) and moved “to keep its entire motion seeking additional redactions SECRET” (my caps.), a nerviness I should think beyond the pale, to which the court denied “that request” and said “that as much of the motion as possible would have to be made public.” The court then went one step further, revealing “new details about several previous rounds of then-secret negotiations between the court and the government, dating back to February [2014], over what would be redacted.”

The National Security State can be seen here to vitiate the rule of law, secrecy being in the DNA of the Executive permeating through all its agencies and bureaus, not least, DOJ. Will we ever get the truth? A week ago Solicitor General Verrilli Jr. said with release of the memo another appeal for redaction would follow, including the identity of the agency responsible for al-Awlaki’s killing—which everyone knows was the CIA. A disheartening conclusion: “Although it is widely known that the C.I.A. operates drones, including from a base in Saudi Arabia, and that it participated in the operation that killed Mr. Awlaki, the Obama administration still officially treats that information as secret.”

III

Nor is it especially forthcoming about the mass collection of facial recognition data. We return to Risen and Proteus and the discussion of an NSA practice that is not really new, only newly revealed—be it noted–through the Snowden disclosures (their import, more vital, in exposing government usurpation than ever thought possible). The reporters state that NSA “is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.” As indicated before, no area of human identity is safe from government spying. To see a brief list of sources is to gain a sense of the range of surveillance. They write: “The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal.” (Without Snowden’s revelations, here as with so much else, we would be in the dark, which government, demonstrated by its actions, prefers, the attacks on him from Obama down showing the fear of revelations.) For NSA, technology summons the future—perhaps why I thought of the title, techno-fascism, as though a window had been opened to the utter destruction of privacy, and for Obama, particularly, a pseudo-sophisticated concept of warfare, in effect, that pushing buttons can rule the world. They observe further: “Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.”

What are we speaking of? “The agency intercepts ‘millions of images per day’—including about 55,000 ‘facial recognition quality images,’” an NSA document summarizes from 2011, as part of enlarging “its mission of tracking suspected terrorists” in what amounts to a dystopian wave-of-the-future position. A 2010 document calls for adopting a “full-arsenal approach,” beyond “traditional communications,” so as to include “biographic and biometric information,” the latter especially not unlike what had been heard in the eugenics movement at the turn of the last century. Whatever the surveillance methods of choice, the act itself does not change, nor the permissiveness of acting: “It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images.” But the phrase of choice in these operations, from whatever source, is SCOOP UP, in turn giving on to a sense of range and scope: “Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.” We expect this from the bulk collection of metadata, but THIS is somehow different, a stripping away of identity per se. A wondrous world of possibilities for repression awaits, as a Carnegie Mellon researcher perhaps unwittingly describes: “’There are still technical limitations [on the total erosion of privacy], but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.’”

It is fair to say that NSA joins CIA, FBI, FISA Court–but why stop there?—president, Congress, judiciary (with few exceptions), in hunting down human aspiration and social democracy as threats to an America determined to keep its priorities straight: the greatest military the world has ever seen, increasing class differentiation with concentrated wealth confined to a numerically infinitesimal upper group matched symmetrically by a disproportionately growing underclass (a perfect pyramid in the making), and to fill in what is becoming essentially a moral void, a flourishing authoritarianism taking form and expression in global hegemony, intervention, counterrevolution. Painless, at least to the American people, should techno-fascism have its way—with, of course, one catch: fascism of every sort becomes self-devouring, hatred of others, either because they’re different or fail to see the splendiferous light about America, is finally channeled inward as self-hatred, something all of the surveillance and images cannot prevent and probably only accelerate.
MY New York Times Comment on the Risen-Poitras article, same date, follows:

Facial recognition data–in the words of Joseph Welch to Joe McCarthy, “Have you no shame, sir?”, applies equally today, if not more so, addressed to NSA under precisely the same circumstances: the abrogation of American civil liberties.

What is this country coming to? A Surveillance State, National Security State, and, if a may, proto-Totalitarian State–for what else can be said of a government sponsoring the total destruction of privacy of its own people, and attempting the same for the world?

In a society where such destruction is passively accepted–an outrageous assault on human dignity, people simply taking it, is another useful description of totalitarianism. All three branches of government are complicit, each in its own way, in this assault on human dignity. Political party, here bipartisan consensus; Executive, integral part of Obama’s enlargement of power; judiciary, FISAC a travesty, Supreme Court culpable in allowing an/or promoting the invasion of rights.

Facial recognition data merely the next step in a cumulative series of abuses accompanied by the supineness of government to check its own USURPATION. There appear to be no checks left, leaving the nation defenseless against its own inner devils, starting from a pathological anticommunism that has morphed into counterterrorism, with a heavy dose of militarism, xenophobia, and resentment about facing the challenges of a now multipolar world.
A decentralized world structure is seen as abhorrent.

[American Dream]

https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2014/09 ... ate-right/

Matthew Lyons on the Anti-State Right

Posted on September 30, 2014


from Three Way Fight

Anti-State Politics on the Far Right: audio and readings
[Matthew Lyons] gave a talk on “Anti-State Politics on the Far Right” at the A-Space Anarchist Community Center in Philadelphia, 9 June 2014. An audio recording of the talk is available here. (Thanks to Suzy S. for recording it!)

This is the description of the talk from the A-Space calendar:

In the era of Hitler and Mussolini, fascists glorified strong nation-states and highly disciplined, top-down organizations. But today, many far rightists advocate political decentralization. Some neo-nazis argue that any law enforcement above the county level is illegitimate, while others promote a strategy of “leaderless resistance” to establish an all-white society. Some far rightists even call themselves anarchists, notably the National-Anarchists, who call for a decentralized system of separate ethnic groups. Meanwhile, one of the most hardline branches of the Christian Right, known as Christian Reconstructionists, wants to impose a theocracy based on biblical law, which would be enforced mainly through local institutions, especially the church and the patriarchal family.

Matthew Lyons will discuss how anti-state politics became so popular on the far right, what the main versions of it look like, and how it relates to the far right’s commitment to social hierarchy and exclusion. He will also address efforts by some far rightists to build alliances with anarchists and other leftists, and how leftists have responded.

read the rest of the post here

from the talk:

“I think that there are certain features of US history that lend themselves to this kinds of politics. From the colonial period on, the US power structure has always relied on decentralized groups of armed men to enforce order: the slave patrols, lynch mobs, the militia units on the border that were fighting Indians. These are not disciplined, centrally created or directed organs of state power—but they have been vital for maintaining the system of racial oppression, and the system of economic oppression, that the US has been based on for centuries.”

[American Dream]

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Liberal counterinsurgency versus the paramilitary right

In this article I'm going to discuss U.S. security forces' changing response to the paramilitary right. I will argue the following:

Although U.S. security forces have an important history of collaborating with or even sponsoring right-wing paramilitary groups in the United States, the past three decades have seen the rise of an insurgent far right that rejects the legitimacy of the U.S. government and has sometimes taken up arms against it.

Security forces have periodically cracked down on this insurgent right when it has engaged in open warfare against the state apparatus, but to a large extent their approach to the insurgent right has been reactive, inconsistent, and counterproductive from the standpoint of maintaining social control.

A liberal faction of the ruling class is promoting a smarter approach to combating the paramilitary right, one that is both more preemptive and more sensitive to rightist fears of state repression. This approach, which has been advanced most fully by the New America Foundation, represents an application of counterinsurgency strategy, a theory of repression that addresses popular grievances in order to bolster elite power more effectively.

Federal agencies have a long history of covert involvement in far right paramilitary organizations, but the nature of this involvement has changed dramatically as the politics of the U.S. far right have changed. During the 1960s, the FBI often refused to intervene as the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists physically attacked civil right workers. Between 1969 and 1972, U.S. Army's Military Intelligence and the Chicago Police jointly operated a far right group called the League of Justice, which burglarized, bugged, and vandalized socialist and anti-war groups. In 1971-1972, the FBI sponsored the paramilitary Secret Army Organization, which targeted anti-war leftists with spying, vandalism, mail theft, assassination plots, shootings, and bombings. The SAO was based in San Diego and claimed branches in eleven states. Most notoriously, in 1979 an FBI informer and an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms helped to plan the Greensboro massacre, in which a coalition of Klansmen and neonazis murdered five members of the Communist Workers Party. (See Donner, Protectors of Privilege, pp. 146-50; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression, pp. 181-2.)

Starting in the early 1980s, the political center of gravity within the far right shifted from a traditional focus on targeting leftists and people of color to a fascist ideology that identified the "Zionist Occupation Government" in Washington as the main enemy. Several Klan leaders re-emerged as neonazis, such as Tom Metzger, who founded White Aryan Resistance, and Louis Beam, who joined Aryan Nations and pioneered the concept of "leaderless resistance." Some far rightists called for a White revolution to overthrow the U.S. government, as portrayed in William Pierce's 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries, while others envisioned an independent Aryan enclave in the Pacific Northwest. In 1983, members of several far-right groups formed an underground paramilitary group known as The Order, which "declared war" on the U.S. government, robbed banks and armored cars, counterfeited money, assassinated Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, and engaged in armed combat with police. Other groups followed The Order's example.

The federal apparatus responded aggressively to this shift. Leonard Zeskind writes that "the Reagan administration's Justice Department…had previously demonstrated little interest in federal prosecutions of attacks by white supremacists on black people and other ordinary citizens," but The Order and related groups pushed them to respond more aggressively. "The FBI planted more confidential informants inside white supremacist groups, started tapping phones, and made arrests in a number of incipient criminal conspiracies" (Blood and Politics, pp. 145-6). By 1985, the federal government had killed The Order's leader in a shootout and sent most of its members to prison. Over the next few years, members of several other neonazi groups were arrested and prosecuted, although the biggest effort -- the 1988 Fort Smith trial of fourteen white supremacists on seditious conspiracy and other charges -- ended in acquittals.

Although many white supremacists rejected an underground strategy, the 1980s gave the movement a list of martyrs and cemented militant opposition to federal authority as an ideological pole on the far right. In the early 1990s, neonazis began to link up with hardline Christian rightists, libertarians, and Birchite anti-globalists in the germ of what would become the Patriot movement, the first U.S. mass movement since World War II in which fascist and non-fascist rightists worked together in coalition. Patriot groups did not necessarily embrace right-wing revolution or racial ideology, but they regarded the U.S. government as part of a plot by globalist elites to take away their freedom, and they advocated forming "citizen militias" to defend themselves against tyranny. Deadly and arguably murderous operations by federal officers fed the growth of the movement, especially the 1992 siege and arrest of white supremacist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (an operation that killed Weaver's wife and teenage son along with a U.S. marshal), and the April 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas (in which eighty members of the cult and four federal agents died).

By 1996 the Patriot movement included some 850 identified groups. An entire subculture, encompassing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of supporters, regarded the established state apparatus as evil and illegitimate. With tens of thousands of them organized in private armed units and a network of "common law courts" claiming to exercise government functions, the movement was creating a type of embryonic dual power in some areas. Although the majority of Patriot activists viewed this as a defensive stance, neonazis and others who advocated offensive actions against the state were a significant part of the mix.

At first, security forces did little to clamp down on the Patriot movement overtly. (Zeskind and others have pointed out that a predominantly black or brown movement spouting anti-government rhetoric and conducting paramilitary training would have been treated very differently.) But in April 1995, neonazi Timothy McVeigh and others blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people, and Patriot militias were widely blamed for the attack. After that, the FBI pursued a wide-ranging crackdown. Here are a few examples from 1995-1998, drawn from a Patriot movement timeline compiled by the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center, which works closely with the FBI:

a tax protester arrested for placing a failed bomb behind the Reno, Nevada, IRS building

three members of the Republic of Georgia militia charged with manufacturing shrapnel-packed bombs and training a team to assassinate politicians

twelve members of the Arizona Viper Team arrested on federal conspiracy, weapons and explosives charges

seven members of the Mountaineer Militia arrested in a plot to blow up the FBI's national fingerprint records center in West Virginia

former Sons of Liberty and other tax protesters set fire to the IRS office in Colorado Springs

eight members of a militia group arrested in connection with a plan to invade Fort Hood, Texas, and kill foreign troops mistakenly believed to be housed there

three men, including one with ties to the separatist Republic of Texas, charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction after threatening President Clinton and other federal officials with biological weapons.

This crackdown contributed to the Patriot movement's collapse in the late 1990s. The movement remained stagnant for a decade, but has been growing fast again since President Obama's election in 2008 and is now believed to be larger than at its peak in the 1990s. Patriot movement groups continue to promote fears of a New World Order conspiracy and challenge the legitimacy of the existing state apparatus, and the movement continues to overlap with more hardline fascist currents.

The state apparatus seems to be conflicted about how to address the paramilitary right. Over the past decade, FBI reports have repeatedly identified right-wing violence as a serious threat, for example in 2004. In 2006, the FBI warned that neonazis were trying to infiltrate law enforcement agencies, and in 2007 they highlighted the threat from solo white supremacists (prefiguring, for example, Wade Michael Page's attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin earlier this year). But in 2009, when conservatives denounced the Department of Homeland Security for a report on the resurgence of "Rightwing Extremism," DHS repudiated the report and disbanded the unit that was studying non-Islamic domestic terrorism. Also in 2009, a report about the militia movement from the Missouri Information Analysis Center (one of the DHS-sponsored "fusion centers") met a similar fate.

Enter the New America Foundation, an elite-based think tank that addresses foreign policy, counterterrorism, and a range of other issues. In 2011 and 2012, their staffers and fellows warned in various media (such as a scholarly study, a panel presentation, and a heavily cited CNN op-ed) that home-grown "extremists" -- and especially rightists -- posed a terrorist threat as big as or bigger than Islamist groups. At the same time, NAF is critical of blundering government efforts that fuel the growth of the far right. In May 2012 they put out a detailed policy paper, by investigative journalist J.M. Berger, about an early 1990s undercover operation called PATCON, in which FBI agents created a dummy white supremacist group to gather intelligence about violent plots by far rightists within the budding Patriot movement. Among other criticisms, the policy paper argues that PATCON helped reinforce Patriot movement paranoia about government repression and agents provocateurs -- and compares this to the effect of scattershot police surveillance on American Muslim communities. In NAF's view, infiltration is still "an important tool," but it needs to be managed more responsibly and with more understanding of how it can damage targeted communities' "trust in government and willingness to cooperate with law enforcement" (p. 23). (Thanks to Nick Paretsky for pointing me to NAF's PATCON policy paper.)

To understand the significance of this report, a bit of background about the New America Foundation is important. First, NAF represents the liberal Eastern establishment wing of the ruling class. Almost two-thirds of the members of its board of directors hold positions in business (most frequently investments), while the rest are mostly academics or journalists. Over three-quarters of the directors hold Ivy League (mostly Harvard) degrees or work at an Ivy League university, and some forty percent of them are current or former members of the Council on Foreign Relations. NAF's board is chaired by Eric Schmidt (chair and former CEO of Google); other prominent board members include hedge fund manager Jonathan Soros (son of George Soros) and "end of history" political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Not surprisingly, some right-wing conspiracy theorists have pointed to NAF as a major node linking global capitalists, Marxist journalists, and the Obama administration in a sinister plot to manipulate public opinion.

Second, NAF is a strong proponent of counterinsurgency strategy (COIN). Kristian Williams has described COIN as a style of warfare that's characterized by "an emphasis on intelligence, security and peace-keeping operation, population control, propaganda, and efforts to gain the trust of the people" (p. 84). NAF argues that "the 'global war on terror' is better conceived as a global counterinsurgency campaign, which typically involves a 20% military approach and an 80% 'softer' approach that uses other levers and incentives." The foundation has promoted this shift with regard to Iraq, Pakistan, and -- perhaps most interestingly -- India: An October 2011 article by NAF's Sameer Lalwani criticized the Indian government's heavily militarized approach to combating the maoist Naxalite insurgency as "brutal and incomplete (by western standards)" and urged institutional overhauls to redress the "distribution of power controlled by the state and elite cadres." This approach is in the tradition of the CIA funding European social democrats in the 1950s in order to undercut support for Communism.

As many leftists have argued, COIN is as much a sophisticated approach to state repression as it is a form of warfare. Williams argues that "the two major developments in American policing since the 1960s -- militarization and community policing -- are actually two aspects of a domestic counterinsurgency program" (p. 90). In The New State Repression, Ken Lawrence highlighted security forces' shift from a reactive approach -- targeting groups after they've engaged in some kind of political protest -- to a preemptive approach, which assumes that even in periods of calm, opponents of the state are "out there plotting and organizing, so the police must go find them, infiltrate them, and plant provocateurs among them" (p. 6). Lawrence traced this "strategy of permanent repression" to the work of British counterinsurgency expert Frank Kitson in Kenya, northern Ireland, and elsewhere, which involved, for example, the creation of "pseudo gangs" as a tactic to confuse and weaken genuine opposition forces. Promoted and refined by both police and military forces in the U.S., domestic counterinsurgency strategy has also been embraced by the Canadian military, as noted by Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.

Without using the term, NAF's PATCON policy paper invokes counterinsurgency strategy in several important ways. First, author J.M. Berger focuses on a specific FBI program from twenty years ago which -- unlike the bureau's better-known reactive measures -- took a preemptive, interventionist approach to the early Patriot movement, and that even created a pseudo-gang as part of this effort. In the Spring of 1991, FBI agents in Austin, Texas, created a phony neonazi organization called the Veterans Aryan Movement (VAM), which claimed to be following in The Order's footsteps: robbing banks and armored cars, stockpiling weapons, and building links with like-minded groups around the country. With this cover story, the VAM was well positioned to spy on genuine neonazis and other members of the Patriot movement that was just beginning to coalesce at this time. Officially, PATCON was supposed to investigate specific potential crimes, but in practice it was an open-ended intelligence-gathering operation. PATCON operatives reported lots of talk about violence by Patriot activists, but almost none of this information was used in prosecutions. At one point, PATCON operatives even withheld information from Army investigators about a theft of night vision goggles from Fort Hood, in order to protect their own operation. In July 1993 the FBI ended PATCON, ostensibly because it had failed to uncover actual criminal activity.

Also in line with counterinsurgency strategy, NAF's PATCON report emphasizes the need for security forces to bolster the state's legitimacy and, in Williams's words, "gain the trust of the people." The policy paper's full title is "PATCON: The FBI's Secret War Against the 'Patriot' Movement, and How Infiltration Tactics Relate to Radicalizing Influences." Berger, who first uncovered PATCON in 2007 as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests, describes how fear of infiltrators pervaded the Patriot movement during PATCON itself, and how public knowledge of the operation has fueled wide-ranging conspiracy theories about the federal government. (Although Berger's account is assuredly not the whole story, claims that PATCON included the Ruby Ridge and Waco operations and even the Oklahoma City bombing, or that it continued long after 1993, are unsubstantiated.)

Berger writes in the NAF policy paper, "The reality of the FBI's extensive infiltration of the Patriot movement helps reinforce a paranoid worldview in which the government becomes the perpetrator of crimes like the Oklahoma City bombing, thus exonerating true radical figures and providing a fresh (if usually false) grievance to fuel further radicalization" (p. 22). The report ends with a list of recommendations for assessing infiltration's "secondary effects" on targeted populations -- not to argue for abolishing police infiltration of political groups, but so that security forces can use the technique more carefully and effectively. (This emphasis on cultivating popular trust in government seems to reflect NAF's concern more than Berger's. It is lacking from Berger's other writings about PATCON, including his original 2007 report and his April 2012 article in Foreign Policy.)

Lastly, NAF's PATCON paper is concerned with improving infiltration techniques not only against rightists but against "potential extremists" more broadly. PATCON is presented as a case study of "the infiltration dilemma" alongside the NYPD's surveillance of Muslim communities in New York City. These two examples were paired more fully in a May 2012 NAF-sponsored panel on "Infiltration and Surveillance: Countering Homegrown Terrorism," in which Berger spoke about PATCON. Here the moderator asked panelists and audience members to set aside moral and legal issues and focus on the questions, when do infiltration techniques work and how well do they work?

The Council on Foreign Relations has also advanced some aspects of a counterinsurgency approach to the paramilitary right. A 2010 op-ed by CFR Fellow and counterterrorism analyst Lydia Khalil urged conservatives to stop minimizing "the serious and growing threat of homegrown right-wing extremism" and to identify rightist violence against government institutions as acts of terrorism. A 2011 CFR report by Jonathan McMasters on "Militant Extremists in the United States" argued the same points in more detail and advocated a preemptive, intelligence-gathering approach to counter rightist violence. Masters's report outlined the "domestic intelligence infrastructure" available to support such work, including the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Homeland Security's Fusion Center program, and the widespread adoption of "intelligence-led policing" by local police departments. While noting civil liberties concerns, the report gave the last word to CFR Adjunct Senior Fellow Richard Falkenrath, who advocates more "permissive" constraints on security forces. Neither Khalil nor McMasters addressed NAF's concern about the tension between gathering intelligence and cultivating popular support for the state, but in other ways the approaches are similar.

* * *

From the standpoint of a ruling class trying to maintain social control, the New America Foundation's approach to rightist violence makes a lot of sense. If you are serious about combating "terrorism," then you need to deal with the homegrown paramilitary right, which has a persistent base of support and has made U.S. government institutions a target for some thirty years. Since paramilitary rightists may be organizing and planning even when they're not carrying out violent attacks, you want your security forces to get to know rightist networks from the inside instead of just reacting to the attacks after they happen. And given that heavy-handed police actions have repeatedly fueled widespread rightist fears about state repression, you need to take these fears into account if you want support for rightist paramilitary violence to shrink instead of grow.

Like many instances of counterinsurgency strategy, NAF's approach here is also well crafted to win backing from liberals and some leftists, who worry about the far right but also worry about police misconduct. In presenting the paramilitary right not just as a criminal network but as a political movement with real grievances, NAF is appropriating an argument that some opponents of the far right (including me) have been making for years. The following point by Kristian Williams applies to movements of the right as well as the left: "As a matter of realpolitik the authorities have to respond in some manner to popular demands; however, COIN allows them to do so in a way that at least preserves, and in the best case amplifies, their overall control. The purpose of counterinsurgency is to prevent any real shift in power" ("The other side of the COIN," p. 85).

We need to be clear that U.S. security forces exist ultimately to maintain ruling class control. They are not, and cannot be, defenders of democracy, and relying on them to combat supremacist movements is a dangerous mistake. While there is a long history of security forces using paramilitary rightists to carry out vigilante repression, there is also a long history of the U.S. government using fears of rightist violence to expand its powers of repression against everyone else. As Don Hamerquist has pointed out previously on Three Way Fight, "when did this country outlaw strikes, ban seditious organizing and speech, intern substantial populations in concentration camps, and develop a totalitarian mobilization of economic, social, and cultural resources for military goals? Obviously it was during WWII, the period of the official capitalist mobilization against fascism, barbarism and for 'civilization.'"

As Hamerquist argues, we need to "worry much more about the consequences of ruling class 'anti fascism,' than [about] ruling class propensities to impose fascism from above." Building on Walden Bello's warning that leftists need to combat not only neoliberalism but also "global social democracy" (an emerging ruling-class strategy that seeks to mitigate global inequality and environmental destruction in a technocratic capitalist framework), Hamerquist suggests that an authoritarian anti-fascism could become a lynchpin of global social democracy. "The fear of fascism will become the functional substitute for improved terms in the sale of labor power. And the likelihood is, I think, that there will be a fascism to fear." Nick Paretsky has already cited the New America Foundation as a prime example of ruling-class support for global social democracy. Now, in advocating a counterinsurgency response to the far right, NAF is taking this one step further.

http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2012/ ... ersus.html

[coffin_dodger]

President of the United States - State of The Union Address - 20 Jan 2014

<excerpt>

"I believe in a smarter kind of American leadership. We lead best when we combine military power with strong diplomacy;"

Exceptionalism and military might combined with strong arm tactics - now, where have I heard that before?

[seemslikeadream]

yes it is and the United States exports it

JANUARY 20, 2015

Out of the Mouths of the Neo-Nazis
Dumb and Dumber in Ukraine
by WILLIAM BLUM
Remember Arseniy Yatsenuk? The Ukrainian whom US State Department officials adopted as one of their own in early 2014 and guided into the position of Prime Minister so he could lead the Ukrainian Forces of Good against Russia in the new Cold War?

In an interview on German television on January 7, 2015 Yatsenuk allowed the following words to cross his lips: “We all remember well the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and Germany. We will not allow that, and nobody has the right to rewrite the results of World War Two”.

The Ukrainian Forces of Good, it should be kept in mind, also include several neo-Nazis in high government positions and many more partaking in the fight against Ukrainian pro-Russians in the south-east of the country. Last June, Yatsenuk referred to these pro-Russians as “sub-humans” , directly equivalent to the Nazi term “untermenschen”.

So the next time you shake your head at some stupid remark made by a member of the US government, try to find some consolation in the thought that high American officials are not necessarily the dumbest, except of course in their choice of who is worthy of being one of the empire’s partners.

The type of rally held in Paris this month to condemn an act of terror by jihadists could as well have been held for the victims of Odessa in Ukraine last May. The same neo-Nazi types referred to above took time off from parading around with their swastika-like symbols and calling for the death of Russians, Communists and Jews, and burned down a trade-union building in Odessa, killing scores of people and sending hundreds to hospital; many of the victims were beaten or shot when they tried to flee the flames and smoke; ambulances were blocked from reaching the wounded … Try and find a single American mainstream media entity that has made even a slightly serious attempt to capture the horror. You would have to go to the Russian station in Washington, DC, RT.com, search “Odessa fire” for many stories, images and videos. Also see the Wikipedia entry on the 2 May 2014 Odessa clashes.

If the American people were forced to watch, listen, and read all the stories of neo-Nazi behavior in Ukraine the past few years, I think they – yes, even the American people and their less-than-intellectual Congressional representatives – would start to wonder why their government was so closely allied with such people. The United States may even go to war with Russia on the side of such people.

L’Occident n’est pas Charlie pour Odessa. Il n’y a pas de défilé à Paris pour Odessa.

CHRIS FLOYD
ALTERNET
ZNET
COUNTERPUNCH
DISSIDENT VOICE
THE INDEPENDENT
ANTIWAR
INFORMED COMMENT

[Luther Blissett]

How American Oligarchs Are Pushing America to the Brink of Fascism
It used to be more difficult for the ultra wealthy to buy American democracy.

By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet February 5, 2015

As the American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is, "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Well, it may well be on our doorstep. And the oligarchs are plotting their final takeover by using their economic dominance to capture governmental power; specifically, the governmental power which sets the rules for the very marketplace that provides the oligarchs with such massive wealth.

Once the American corporate barons own the institutions that are meant to regulate them, it’s game-over for both rational capitalism (including competition) and for democracy.

Last week, at David and Charles Koch’s annual winter meeting near Palm Springs, California, it was announced that the Koch Brothers’ political organization would spend close to $900 million on the 2016 election. If this goal is met, the group of corporate leaders will spend far more than the Republican Party and its congressional campaign committees spent, combined, in the 2012 campaign.

Once upon a time, it would have been illegal for the Koch Brothers and their fellow oligarchs to buy an election. Of course, that time was before the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

In 2010, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, presented the best opportunity for the Roberts Court to use its five vote majority to totally re-write the face of politics in America, rolling us back to the pre-1907 era of the Robber Barons.

As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The New Yorker ("No More Mr. Nice Guy"): "In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

Back then, the modern Republican Party and the oligarchs that dominated it, knew that the only way to recover power was to immediately clear away all impediments to unrestrained corporate participation in electoral politics. If a corporate board likes a politician, they can make sure he or she is elected every time; if the CEO oligarchs become upset with a politician, they can carpet-bomb her district with a few million dollars worth of ads and politically destroy her.

And it looks like that's exactly what the Roberts Court accomplished. The oligarchs succeeded. In the Citizens United case, forces within the Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to go all the way back to the 1980s and re-examine the rationales for Congress to have any power to regulate corporate "free speech."

As Robert Barnes wrote in The Washington Post on June 30, 2009, "Citizens United's attorney, former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson, had told the court that it should use the case to overturn the corporate spending ban the court recognized in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, as well as its decision in 2003 to uphold McCain-Feingold as constitutional."

The setup for this came in June of 2007, in the case of the Federal Election Commission v. Wisconsin Right To Life, in which the Roberts Court ruled that the FEC couldn't prevent WRTL from running ads just because they were a corporation.

"A Moroccan cartoonist," Justice Scalia opened his opinion with his usual dramatic flair, "once defended his criticism of the Moroccan monarch (lèse majesté being a serious crime in Morocco) as follows: ‘I'm not a revolutionary, I'm just defending freedom of speech. I never said we had to change the king-no, no, no, no! But I said that some things the king is doing, I do not like. Is that a crime?'"

"Well," Scalia wrote, "in the United States (making due allowance for the fact that we have elected representatives instead of a king) it is a crime, at least if the speaker is a union or a corporation (including not-for-profit public-interest corporations)... That is the import of §203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA)."

The idea of Congress passing laws that limited corporate "free speech" was clearly horrifying to Scalia. He went after the 1990 Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce case, in which the MCC was limited in their "free speech" in a political campaign because they were a corporation.

"This (Austin) was the only pre-McConnell case in which this Court had ever permitted the Government to restrict political speech based on the corporate identity of the speaker," he complained. "Austin upheld state restrictions on corporate independent expenditures," and, God forbid, "The statute had been modeled after the federal statute that BCRA §203 amended..."

The Austin case, Scalia concluded his opinion with four others nodding, "was a significant departure from ancient First Amendment principles. In my view, it was wrongly decided."

Scalia also quoted at length from opinions in the Grosjean v. American Press Co case, "holding that corporations are guaranteed the ‘freedom of speech and of the press, safeguarded by the due process of law clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,'" and from the 1986 Pacific Gas & Elec. Co. v. Public Util. Comm'n of Cal. case: "The identity of the speaker is not decisive in determining whether speech is protected"; "[c]orporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas' that the First Amendment seeks to foster."

The bottom line, for Scalia, was that, "The principle that such advocacy is ‘at the heart of the First Amendment's protection' and is ‘indispensable to decision making in a democracy' is ‘no less true because the speech comes from a corporation rather than an individual."

Continuing to quote from a plurality opinion in Pacific Gas, Scalia "rejected the arguments that corporate participation ‘would exert an undue influence on the outcome of a referendum vote'; that corporations would ‘drown out other points of view' and ‘destroy the confidence of the people in the democratic process..."

He even quoted an opinion in the Grossjean case, writing that "corporations are guaranteed the ‘freedom of speech and of the press...safeguarded by the due process of law clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.'"

The Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no "person" shall be denied "equal protection of the laws," was promulgated after the Civil War to free the slaves. But corporations have long asserted that because it says "person" rather than "natural person" it included giving, in 1868 when the Amendment was ratified into law, full Constitutional rights under the Bill of Rights to corporations. (Corporations are, at law, known as "artificial persons" and humans are "natural persons" - both have to have some sort of "personhood" in order to pay taxes, sue and be sued, etc.)

As Scalia wrote in his opinion in FEC v. Wisconsin Right To Life: "...FECA was directed to expenditures not just by ‘individuals,' but by ‘persons,' with ‘persons' specifically defined to include ‘corporation[s].'"

Chief Justice Roberts weighed in, too, in the main decision. It's a fascinating decision to read - and search for occurrences of the word "corporation" - and here's one of Roberts' more convoluted observations in defense of corporate free speech rights:

Accepting the notion that a ban on campaign speech could also embrace issue advocacy would call into question our holding in Bellotti that the corporate identity of a speaker does not strip corporations of all free speech rights. It would be a constitutional ‘bait and switch' to conclude that corporate campaign speech may be banned in part because corporate issue advocacy is not, and then assert that corporate issue advocacy may be banned as well, pursuant to the same asserted compelling interest, through a broad conception of what constitutes the functional equivalent of campaign speech, or by relying on the inability to distinguish campaign speech from issue advocacy.

Bottom line - corporate free speech rights are Real Rights that Must Be Respected.

Justice Souter wrote a rather frightening dissent (this was a 5-4 decision, with the usual right-wing suspects on the "5" side): "Finally, it goes without saying that nothing has changed about the facts. In Justice Frankfurter's words, they demonstrate a threat to ‘the integrity of our electoral process, which for a century now Congress has repeatedly found to be imperiled by corporate, and later union, money: witness the Tillman Act, Taft-Hartley, FECA, and BCRA.

"McConnell was our latest decision vindicating clear and reasonable boundaries that Congress has drawn to limit ‘the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth,' and the decision could claim the justification of ongoing fact as well as decisional history in recognizing Congress's authority to protect the integrity of elections from the distortion of corporate and union funds.

"After today, the ban on contributions by corporations and unions and the limitation on their corrosive spending when they enter the political arena are open to easy circumvention, and the possibilities for regulating corporate and union campaign money are unclear.

"The ban on contributions will mean nothing much, now that companies and unions can save candidates the expense of advertising directly, simply by running ‘issue ads' without express advocacy, or by funneling the money through an independent corporation like Wisconsin Right To Life."

Sounding almost depressed, Souter closed his dissent with these words: "I cannot tell what the future will force upon us, but I respectfully dissent from this judgment today."

The attempt of corporations (and their lawyers, like Roberts was before ascending to a federal court) to usurp American democracy is nothing new, as David Souter well knew. Fascism has always been a threat to democracy. Oligarchs have sought to buy the power of government to suit themselves, since the beginning.

In early 1944 the New York Times asked Vice President Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace's answers to those questions were published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those... With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."

Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggested that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."

As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia:

"...Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:

"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."

But, he thundered in that speech:

"Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"

We now stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is rising in America. Oligarchs like the Koch Brothers are poised to capture more political power. The point of their spear is "corporate personhood" and "corporate free speech rights."

The Roberts' Court's decisions and the election plans of the Koch Brothers and their fellow oligarchs now eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said: "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."

[American Dream]

Paul Street is more social democrat than I am, but I consider him a solid thinker all the way:

Worse Than Fascism?

By: Paul Street



Can the U.S. political system be considered 'fascist'?

Published 4 February 2015

The contemporary U.S. model is some ways worse than classic or real historical fascism in advancing tyrannical imperial and state-capitalist goals.

I’ve never been much for calling the United States (U.S.) “fascist,” something that a significant number of my fellow leftists and progressives like to do in a half-serious way. What do such progressives mean when they use that loaded and ugly term to describe the contemporary U.S.? In their more serious moments, the factors mentioned include a merging of corporate and state power; suppression of unions; a culture and vast apparatus of imperial militarism; celebration of violence and cruelty; nationalism; hostility to equality and democracy; demagogic appeals to a frustrated middle class; hatred of the weak and poor; attachment to tradition and hierarchy; the systematic subordination of racial and ethnic minorities; militarized policing; mass incarceration; the devaluation or erosion of basic civil liberties; and hostility to intellectuals, modern science, liberalism, and socialism.

I would be the first to acknowledge that all of these and other reactionary and authoritarian features and tendencies are all too terribly present in the contemporary U.S. I would add that certain American current events can take on a distinctly fascistic feel, as when paramilitary police crushed the Occupy encampments in Oakland, California and New York City in the fall of 2011 and terrorized locked-down Boston and Boston area residents after the Boston Marathon bombings in April of 2013; when Civil Rights protestors in Ferguson, Missouri faced graphic military-style police repression last summer; and when New York City police accused civil rights protestors and New York City’s liberal mayor of contributing to the murder of two NYPD officers last December. One could mention other examples.

Still, call me old fashioned and overly focused on European history, but I think it is misleading and even a little silly to call the U.S. “fascist.” Here, from historian Robert Paxton’s study Anatomy of Fascism (written largely with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy in mind), is a useful if incomplete definition of fascism – the real thing – in interwar and WWII Europe:

“A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

I would elaborate on Paxton’s characterization, adding the existence of a (typically “charismatic”) dictator embodying the “national will,” a strong component of Social Darwinian racism, disdain for elections and normal bourgeois-parliamentary procedures and institutions, the systematic physical destruction of working class organizations, harsh suppression of the Left, and a highly mobilized largely petit-bourgeois sociopolitical base deeply resentful of labor, leftists, and intellectuals and ready to fight and kill liberal, Left, and ethnic/racial others and enemies at home and abroad. I situate fascism within capitalism, seeing it as a product of societal tensions produced by the bourgeois order, as allied with the most reactionary wings of the elite business class, and as unwilling to fundamentally challenge capitalist ownership and direction of the economy.

Held up against these historically appropriate criteria, the United States today is certainly corporatist, imperialist, authoritarian, un- and even anti-egalitarian, objectively racist and sexist, and much more terrible to mention, but not really “fascist.” It has numerous dreadful overlaps with fascism and a number of significantly fascistic components (many if not most of its police agencies, the prison system, much of the U.S. military). But it has no ranting, all-powerful dictator. It has not abolished bourgeois elections and parties, preferring instead to uphold (not-so) “democratic” voting and elections at all levels of government.

Highly mobilized mass movements of nationalist right-wing shock troops do not crush the bones and skulls of liberals, leftists, pacifists, and trade unionists in the streets (or gather to undertake violent campaigns) of ethnic cleansing and war in the U.S. today. American elites, media, and politics make a great point of claiming to be “post-racial” and non-sexist (a first technically female president following two terms of a first technically Black president is a distinct possibility in 2016) and even in many cases gay-friendly. Radical leftists and others do not generally worry about getting beaten up by jackbooted rightist thugs when they speak on behalf of civil liberties, civil rights, ecological sustainability, electoral reform, peace, or even revolutionary socialism.

The hard right is not terribly mobilized or together in the U.S. today. The powers that be here seem to want the masses apolitical, privatized, distracted, divided, and individualized, concerned primarily with consumerism and personal pursuits. Angry white lower middle-class Americans are expected to channel their violent impulses into watching football and playing sadistic video games, not beating up leftists and fighting wars (only a tiny percentage of the population is enlisted in the military). Nationalism is significantly contained by the broader hegemony of corporate globalization, despite obvious tensions.

Dependent on the money of billionaire oil and gas baron Koch brothers and other elite funders, the Tea Party crowd is clueless and disinterested when it comes to building anything like a mass movement, fascist or otherwise. The top U.S. officeholders reach their positions through the slimy, timeworn, and plutocratic machinations of money, media, public relations, and dollar-drenched major party politics, not by deploying enforcers to shoot, club, burn, and bomb their opponents and civil society into submission.

If the U.S. today is “fascist,” its fascism is cooking on a low flame and distant burner. It exhibits a distinctly “inverted” (demobilized and neoliberal, plutocratic, “market”-mediated and corporate-managed) form of the disease that probably doesn’t deserve the use of the term unless the word drained of its basic historical essence.

To say this, however is not to offer anything remotely like grateful praise to the contemporary U.S., with its vicious, eco-cidal ruling class and its reigning sociopathic institutions. Under the “inverted totalitarianism" (U.S. political scientist Sheldon Wolin’s term) that is 21st century America’s “corporate-managed democracy” (Wolin again), many of the basic objectives of fascism – the defeat of unions and the working class, the degradation of democracy, the enforcement of hierarchy and savage inequality, racial subordination, the marginalization of the Left, racial divide and rule, militarization of society, and permanent arms and war economy – are achieved without the discomfort and uncertainly imposed by barking Fuhrers and marching brown-shirts. Chilling as it may sound to say, fascism would be redundant in the United States today. The U.S. ruling class doesn’t need it. It gets the same results with a different – more atomized, privatized, apathetic, consumerized, and “inverted” – model of authoritarian rule, one that makes an insistent and deceptive claim to be a great force for modern Western democracy, Enlightenment values (even if U.S. presidents end every major speech with “God Bless America”), and freedom at home and abroad.

One might even argue that the contemporary U.S. model is some ways worse than classic or real historical fascism in advancing tyrannical imperial and state-capitalist goals. Real-deal European fascism made no pretense of being anything other than authoritarian and anti-democratic. Its hostility to popular governance, civil liberties, social justice, parliamentary deliberation, social diversity, the Enlightenment, free thought and discourse (and more) was open and explicit. It was quite forthright, to say the least. There was no mistaking its vicious, top-down evil. You knew what you were dealing with – and if you forgot, jackbooted thugs were there to remind you.

Things are trickier and more complex with contemporary U.S. state-capitalist and imperial-corporate-financial-neoliberal authoritarianism, which is adept at wrapping itself in the false and illusory false flag of democracy.

Most U.S. intellectuals would no doubt be aghast at the notion that there is any way in which the contemporary U.S. “homeland” might be worse than fascism..Many would remind us of Hitler’s death camps, where six million Jews (along with countless others, including Gypsies, gays, Communists, socialists and Slavs) were systematically butchered by poison gassing and other appalling means. I understand the discomfort, and I repeat that I do not think it is accurate to describe America as fascist.

At the same time, I would urge those who might cite the Nazi Holocaust to question my argument to acknowledge that the contemporary American System is heir to monumental acts and processes of American genocide and mass atrocity at home (the Native American and Black Slavery Holocausts) and abroad (the millions of Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Filipino, Laotian, Cambodian, Latin American, Iraqi, Afghan, Palestinian, and other civilians the U.S. military and its proxies have directly and indirectly killed since August of 1945). I also advise reflection on the massive crime of ecocide and omnicide being perpetrated by contemporary U.S. (and global) capital in soulless defiance of the ever more desperate findings, pleas, and recommendations of modern Earth science. Corporate- and Wall Street-managed America stands in the vanguard of anthropogenic global warming, “the leading issue of our or any time” (John Sonbanmatsu). Does this crime not amount to the attempted poison-gassing (carbon-gassing) unto death of, well, life on Earth – a transgression that promises to make even the almost unthinkable misdeeds of the ultimate fascist Hitler pale by comparison?

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014).

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinio ... -0044.html

[seemslikeadream]

from CounterPunch

FEBRUARY 18, 2015


Word Games
How Euphemisms Absolve Pillage and Mass Murder
by ABBY MARTIN
Obama’s election in 2008 marked a new dawn for hundreds of millions of people looking to an eloquent, constitutional lawyer for “Hope” and “Change” in America. However, it quickly became apparent that Obama had little substance beyond the slogans branded by his campaign.

With a little more than a year left in his presidency, his milquetoast legacy has been embodied by his greatest skill: wordcraft. Obama’s team has continued, if not exacerbated, most Bush era policies, simply rebranding them in order to appease and confuse the public into compliance.

One of the first things his administration did was declare an end to the “War on Terror” that the Bush sociopaths launched worldwide. Turns out, all they wanted to do was stop calling it a “War on Terror,” making clear that any further military involvement abroad would simply be called “Overseas Contingency Operations.” Six plus years later, and the Nobel Peace Prize winning president now has bombing campaigns in seven different countries under his belt.

And the casualties of the empire’s plunders? Collateral damage.

There are also new terms for war. When US and NATO bombed the hell out of Libya resulting in the failed state we see today, it wasn’t a war. No, it was merely a “Kinetic Military Action,” according to government officials.

Torture is now “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and the act of kidnapping and exporting torture is simply called extraordinary rendition.

Whenever the administration sends predator drones to bomb people around the world, they are just “surgical strikes” targeting “militants”. However, simply being military aged male constitutes someone as a militant, and according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, less than 4 percent of drone victims in Pakistan are officially listed as al Qaeda.

When Obama’s cabinet dropped the term “enemy combatant”, it was a purely symbolic move to distance itself away from the Bush Guantanamo era. Unfortunately, over 140 men still remain rotting away in the notorious prison despite what they’re now called on paper. And when these prisoners go on a hunger strike, it’s now called a “long term non-religious fast”.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald reminds us, altering the names of policies doesn’t change the fact that they’re still happening:

“The Obama administration…makes only the most cosmetic and inconsequential changes – designed to generate headlines misleadingly depicting a significant reversal – while, in fact, retaining the crux of Bush’s extremist detention theory.”

Obviously this rebranding tactic wasn’t invented by Obama’s PR team. Propaganda was propelled with the advent of PR genius Edward Bernays and later Nazi mastermind Joseph Goebbels, whose powerful techniques have been perfected and employed for decades by governments worldwide. Disturbing Newspeak phrases that absolve their pillaging and mass murder have permeated society and warped our interpretation of reality.

The term “Mowing the Lawn” is what governments say to allude to the literal mowing down of civilians. Shockingly, the callous term has been used not only by Israeli military commanders in reference to the recent bloodbath of Palestinians, but it’s also been used by Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser Bruce Riedel who said this about drone strikes:

“You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.”

If you think that’s bad, officials also use the cute phrase “Shake ‘n Bake” to refer to using banned white phosphorus before blowing up people with high grade explosives. Administrators also think so lowly of the people they’re killing with flying robots that they brutishly call them “bug splats”.

Beyond war, in today’s cut throat capitalist world overrun by neoliberal doctrine, there’s a language of dehumanization employed towards everything, spoken among the elite class and policy heads in order to keep things running efficiently.

As the Guardian points out, the term “cleansing the stock” is actually used to describe excess human beings by parliamentarians. After all, you can’t afford to actually feel emotion, empathy or sorrow for the paupers at the bottom of the totem pole.

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to the natural world, the language is even more crude. According to journalist George Monbiot,

“Nature is “natural capital”. Ecological processes are ecosystem services, because their only purpose is to serve us. Hills, forests and rivers are described in government reports as green infrastructure. Wildlife and habitats are asset classes in an ecosystems market. Fish populations are invariably described as stocks, as if they exist only as moveable assets from which wealth can be extracted – like disabled recipients of social security.”

All of these devaluing terms have seeped into mainstream consciousness, dutifully repeated by media figures and then, by us.

Words hold tremendous power, and if we don’t reclaim our language and start seeing people instead of “militants”, drone victims instead of “bug splats”, or natural splendor instead of “green infrastructure”, then the voiceless are destined to be silenced forever.

Abby Martin is an artist, activist and journalist whose work can be viewed at http://www.mediaroots.org/. She currently works as a correspondent, writer and host of RT America’s Breaking the Set.

[JackRiddler]

This thread title is mildly nonsensical. It's like saying the U.S. is not under Roman law. It's not. Yet it draws from. It also has many unrelated elements. And contrary ones. Yet. There is no denying all the ways in which the U.S. system mimics fascism, contributed to its classical European forms, adopted elements from them after, promoted fascist models (not always) around the world for 80 years, and in some ways even exceeds. And yet it's not the same. Also, tomorrow it's going to be different. Amazing.

[American Dream]

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2000/1 ... s-fascism/

What is Fascism?

Some General Ideological Features

By Matthew N. Lyons, on November 1, 2000

I am skeptical of efforts to produce a “definition” of fascism. As a dynamic historical current, fascism has taken many different forms, and has evolved dramatically in some ways. To understand what fascism has encompassed as a movement and a system of rule, we have to look at its historical context and development–as a form of counter-revolutionary politics that first arose in early twentieth-century Europe in response to rapid social upheaval, the devastation of World War I, and the Bolshevik Revolution. The following paragraphs are intended as an initial, open-ended sketch.

Fascism is a form of extreme right-wing ideology that celebrates the nation or the race as an organic community transcending all other loyalties. It emphasizes a myth of national or racial rebirth after a period of decline or destruction. To this end, fascism calls for a “spiritual revolution” against signs of moral decay such as individualism and materialism, and seeks to purge “alien” forces and groups that threaten the organic community. Fascism tends to celebrate masculinity, youth, mystical unity, and the regenerative power of violence. Often, but not always, it promotes racial superiority doctrines, ethnic persecution, imperialist expansion, and genocide. At the same time, fascists may embrace a form of internationalism based on either racial or ideological solidarity across national boundaries. Usually fascism espouses open male supremacy, though sometimes it may also promote female solidarity and new opportunities for women of the privileged nation or race.

Fascism’s approach to politics is both populist–in that it seeks to activate “the people” as a whole against perceived oppressors or enemies–and elitist–in that it treats the people’s will as embodied in a select group, or often one supreme leader, from whom authority proceeds downward. Fascism seeks to organize a cadre-led mass movement in a drive to seize state power. It seeks to forcibly subordinate all spheres of society to its ideological vision of organic community, usually through a totalitarian state. Both as a movement and a regime, fascism uses mass organizations as a system of integration and control, and uses organized violence to suppress opposition, although the scale of violence varies widely.

Fascism is hostile to Marxism, liberalism, and conservatism, yet it borrows concepts and practices from all three. Fascism rejects the principles of class struggle and workers’ internationalism as threats to national or racial unity, yet it often exploits real grievances against capitalists and landowners through ethnic scapegoating or radical-sounding conspiracy theories. Fascism rejects the liberal doctrines of individual autonomy and rights, political pluralism, and representative government, yet it advocates broad popular participation in politics and may use parliamentary channels in its drive to power. Its vision of a “new order” clashes with the conservative attachment to tradition-based institutions and hierarchies, yet fascism often romanticizes the past as inspiration for national rebirth.

Fascism has a complex relationship with established elites and the non-fascist right. It is never a mere puppet of the ruling class, but an autonomous movement with its own social base. In practice, fascism defends capitalism against instability and the left, but also pursues an agenda that sometimes clashes with capitalist interests in significant ways. There has been much cooperation, competition, and interaction between fascism and other sections of the right, producing various hybrid movements and regimes.

[seemslikeadream]

MAY 17, 2016
Organized Misery is Fascism
by JOHN STANTON

“When the United States goes to war they will introduce a war economy. This means sacrificing everything for the army and war purposes – and misery for the population. How can there be a self-sustaining economy for the United States? In times of peace you have 10 million unemployed – and this in a time of relative prosperity; during crises you have 13 to 14 million unemployed. Moreover you must export. To do this you must import. What? Products that will ruin your farmers, who are even now being supported artificially? No, there is no possibility. Instead, it is necessary to organize a kind of fascism – an organized control of the misery, because what is fascism except the organization of misery for the people. The New Deal tried to do it in a better way but did not succeed, because at that period you remained too rich for a fascist misery. However you will become poorer and poorer, and as a result the next New Deal will be in fascist form…

“Capitalism in the United States is running head on into those problems which impelled Germany in 1914 upon the road of war … For Germany it was a question of ‘organizing’ Europe. For the United States it is a question of ‘organizing’ the world. History is taking mankind directly into the volcanic eruption of American imperialism…The United States cannot enter a world war, or even make serious preparation for it without assuring first the full domination of the Latin American countries…Washington will not permit…a rebellious attitude. The armies, of course, have a world purpose, but the immediate step is first directed to South America to teach them to obey. For the United States, Latin America is like Austria and Czechoslovakia was to Hitler – a springboard to the larger things…Washington will name the terms.”

— Leon Trotsky

Just about one half of the year 2016 is in the world’s history books. The 16th year of the 21st Century, a century that was supposed to usher in a new era of democracy, opportunity, “green thinking”, and income for all, has thus far been a bust for much of the citizens of the world. Some 40.8 million displaced people roam the continents of the world due to the effects of climate change and the fallout from varying degrees of conflict/war ranging from the War on Terror and War on Drugs, to covert-overt regime changes in Brazil, Ukraine, Egypt, Paraguay, Iraq, Libya and Honduras. Syria remains a work in progress.

US economic statistics mask a crumbling economy and infrastructure. The US is tempting fate with the “up yours” brinkmanship with Russia and China. US encirclement of these two countries with ABM batteries, the training of militaries in countries bordering the two behemoths, and the propaganda campaigns waged against them may not turn out well for anyone on the planet. Russia and China are certain to, legitimately counter each escalatory measure. That’s what nations do when threatened.

Some of the hot words at 2016’s midpoint are brinkmanship, uncertainty, privatization, austerity, suicide, fascist, destabilize, threat, security, hybrid war, propaganda, disparity, racist, displaced, shootings, sanctions, and discrimination. Sides are being taken, and must be taken. Centrism/compromise appears dead: Fascist Right or Neoliberal Left are the options. This seems to be a worldwide disease. In the US presidential election, for example, its Donald Trump representing the former and Hillary Clinton the latter. In the end, Trump may prevail simply because voters want to “see what happens.”

They Don’t Give a Shit

The view from the precariat in the US demonstrates the plight not only of millions of Americans, but many more in similar situations around the globe: Economic and social life is bleak and American officials/office seekers, like their counterparts the world over, are repulsive and indifferent. At the website More Crows than Eagles, this is extraordinarily well-said in a piece titled The Unnecessariat:

“Clinton doesn’t give a shit about me. When Clinton talks about people hurt by the economy, she means you: elite-educated white-collar people with obvious career tracks who are having trouble with their bills and their 401k plans. That’s who boomed under the last president Clinton, especially the 401ks. Me, or the three guys fighting two nights ago over the Township mowing contract, we’re nothing. Clinton doesn’t have an economic plan for us. Nobody has an economic plan for us. There is no economic plan for us, ever. We keep driving trucks around and keep the margins above gas money and maybe take an odd job here or there, but essentially, we’re history and nobody seems to mind saying so. Trump doesn’t have an economic plan for me either. What Trump’s boys have for me is a noose- but that’s the choice I’m facing, a lifetime of grueling poverty, or apocalypse. Yeah I know, not fun and games- the shouts, the smashing glass, the headlights on the lawn, but what am I supposed to do, raise my kid to stay one step ahead of the inspectors and don’t, for the love of god, don’t ever miss a payment on your speeding ticket? A noose is something I know how to fight. A hole in the frame of my car is not. A lifetime of feeling that sense, that “ohhhh, shiiiiiit…” of recognition that another year will go by without any major change in the way of things, little misfortunes upon misfortunes… a lifetime of paying a grand a month to the same financial industry busily padding the 401k plans of cyclists in spandex, who declare a new era of prosperity in America? Who can find clarity, a sense of self, any kind of redemption in that world?”

Yet, “that world” is precisely what neoliberal vultures like Hillary Clinton and her corporate sponsors on Wall Street, in Hollywood and the Defense Industrial Base/Pentagon, on the editorial pages of the Washington Post and New York Times, and in the many Associations and Think Tanks on the East and West coasts seek. It’s the same story in the countries of the European Union. Trump seems to endorse much the same with his call for cuts in Social Security (at least in Europe there are mass movements like Nuit Debout are trying to resist “that world.”)

Eve of Destruction

But to “fight the power” is tough, even in the US Homeland: Look what happened to Flint and Detroit and to pensions, food assistance, and military veterans returning home from war. And when the neoliberal gangs decide that the government of a country needs to be reigned-in, resistance is often futile. And if the gang leader in charge is the United States, the fight is lost cause.

The US remains the dominant global power and, as such, can shape cognitive environments and physical terrain using its extraordinary instruments of national power (INP’s): Diplomacy, Intelligence, Military, Economic, Finance, Law Enforcement, Information and Human Capital. There is a symbiotic relationship between the US government and private sector (academia, media, NGO’s, telecommunications, etc.) elite who design and execute strategies, operations and tactics meant to maintain the supremacy of the INP’s and, hence, America’s supreme position in the world. And, there is, of course, dumb luck like having the Atlantic and Pacific moats protecting fortress USA.

The Honduran government fell in 2009 in a US supported coup. That country’s social and economic fabric has collapsed. Brazil faces a similar plight: Rousseff—Lula supporters will not take the situation lightly. Consider the neoliberal financial forces at work behind the coup in Brazil and US links.

According to Telesur, the “Free Brazil Movement (MBL) is a far-right collective of young people that believe the solutions to the country’s economic problems are based on free-market policies. Fabio Ostermann and Juliano Torres, two of MBL leaders, were educated in the Atlas Leadership Academy, linked to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, financed by the notorious U.S. businessmen the Koch Brothers. Furthermore, the brothers have millions of dollars invested in the oil industry, which could explain their interest in destabilizing the Brazilian government and Petrobras. Another of the leading groups, Students For Liberty (EPL) – working together with the MBL – is the Brazilian associate of an organization with the same name in the U.S., also financed by the Koch Brothers.

Furthermore, investment banker Hélio Beltrão Filho, the national head of EPL, inherited shares in Grupo Ultra, one of Brazil’s largest holdings. Grupo Ultra provided logistic and financial support to the right-wing military coup in 1964. A third important group involved in the protests is VemPraRua (Come to the streets), which has become the center of controversy in recent weeks. After several journalists investigated the group, revealing that its financial support came from the Study Foundation, which belongs to Brazil’s richest individual, Jorge Paulo Lemann. Lemann is owner of AmBev, the biggest beer production company of Brazil, and owns the Burger King franchise in the country. The businessman has denied taking a stand in Brazilian politics and claims the foundation’s director used it for political purposes. Rodrigo Telles, who runs the foundation, is also an AmBev shareholder…many government supporters see the move as part of a coup, similar to what occurred in Honduras against Manuel Zelaya or in Paraguay against Fernando Lugo.”

Trotsky was right.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

http://blackagendareport.com/who's_the_fascist%3F

Freedom Rider: Who’s the Fascist?
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

The U.S. public loves fascists; they elect them, constantly. Donald Trump, who “says he would raise the minimum wage and stop the endless efforts at regime change,” is called a fascist by some. But Hillary Clinton “is happy to bomb Libya or Syria or any other country,” and played a major role in mass Black incarceration. Barack Obama is the war-maker and deporter-in-chief. “All of the major party candidates fit the F word description in some way.”
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“No one comes into office with any intention of undoing America’s leadership as the world’s worst jailer.”

Donald Trump is the ill spoken, boorish, graceless version of every American president in modern history. He differs from them only in his unconcealed appeals to white nationalism. But Democrats aren’t much better. They pretend to work on behalf of human, civil and economic rights but those claims are lies. They are meant to hide their partnerships with corporate America, very wealthy individuals and the worldwide imperialist project.

If Trump is a fascist then he will fit in nicely with the pantheon of horrific men we are told to respect and venerate. Barack Obama charges and convicts whistle blowers with the little used espionage act from the era of Woodrow Wilson. He claims and has exercised an invented right to kill Americans. His predecessor invaded and occupied Iraq but he continues the dirty deed there and in Afghanistan. He tries to fool the public by assassinating “al Qaeda number two,” over and over again. Al Qaeda certainly doesn’t lack for plan B staffers.

Bush the younger cut tax rates for rich people but Obama didn’t change that. Under the guise of compromising with intransigent Republicans he did the same thing. When he and the Democrats controlled Congress in 2009 and 2010 they raised the minimum wage a paltry 70 cents.

Conversely, Donald Trump says he would raise the minimum wage and says he would stop the endless efforts at regime change. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders have questioned that fundamental premise of American foreign policy. Hillary Clinton has already proven herself to be particularly blood thirsty. She is happy to bomb Libya or Syria or any other country. Her so-called expertise amounts to nothing more than an expansion of state sponsored terror committed by the United States.

“It is a Democratic president who brought back a cold war against Russia and recklessly brought troops to the edge of that country’s borders.”

Trump says he wouldn’t cut Social Security while Barack Obama famously declared that he and his 2012 Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, agreed on the need to cut this program that was once called the “third rail” of politics.

Every president since the 1980s has grown the horrific mass incarceration industry. Using wars on drugs as a pretext they have locked up 2 million people, half of whom are black. No one comes into office with any intention of undoing America’s leadership as the world’s worst jailer.

American history teaches black people to be, at the very least, wary of public officials who are beloved by red necks as much as Trump is. When Trump speaks of preventing Muslim immigration or deporting all of the estimated 11 million undocumented people in this country he is making inherently racist appeals.

That is why he is protested and rightly so. But the protesters have already missed the mark by giving a pass to equally questionable policy actions and statements coming from Democrats. It is a Democratic president who brought back a cold war against Russia and recklessly brought troops to the edge of that country’s borders. This scenario was unheard of during the worst days of the cold war and now risks nuclear confrontation. That is because George W. Bush unilaterally abrogated the missile defense treaty with Russia. Perhaps he can be called a fascist also.

The trade deals passed by American presidents with congressional connivance grow worse. There is no longer any pretense that their goal is to help corporations maximize profits and minimize everyone else’s rights. Not even members of Congress were allowed access to the text of the Trans Pacific Partnership legislation.

“If a politician has the right establishment credentials and knows how to give prepared speeches he or she can get away with committing any outrage.”

If Trump is protested, Obama ought to be as well. He is spending his last year in office on an imperialism tour. He goes to Hiroshima for photo opportunities with atomic bomb survivors while building more nuclear warheads than any other president. He tells endless lies about Russian “aggression” but he is the provocative head of state.

Trump should be disliked by Latinos and everyone else when he says that Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers. But Obama is the deporter in chief, sending a record number of Latino immigrants out of the country with dubious rationales, devastating them and their families.

Apparently all of the major party candidates fit the F word description in some way. Trump’s bombast and ignorance make him the easiest to pick out of the crowd but appearances are deceiving. It seems that if a politician has the right establishment credentials and knows how to give prepared speeches he or she can get away with committing any outrage.

In just the last 40 years American presidents or their allied partners in crime have killed people in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Congo, Somalia, Haiti, Grenada, Gaza, Kosovo, Serbia, Sudan, Syria, Libya and Yemen. What do they have to do to be called fascists? Showing bad manners seems to be the only thing that sets off expressions of outrage among Americans.

There is already fascism in the White House, the Justice Department, the State Department and Congress. The only question is who will be the next person to keep that sick machinery running.

[Karmamatterz]

http://youtu.be/U1Qt6a-vaNM

This video is long and discusses the roots of fascists corporate America which led to WWII and a lot of other evil. It's interesting as hell to watch but makes too many assertions without facts to back things up. I never heard of the folkie song about poor Henry Ford's manufacturing plants in Nazi Germany being bombed. That and other tidbits make it worth watching.

Am also reading Family of Secrets (the Busg dynasty) which digs up a ton of unusual connections to Poppy and the various gangsters from the Intel community. I now many of you probably already discussed the book by Russ Baker. These are the real fascists with power to enslave.
http://www.amazon.com/Family-Secrets-Am ... 1501263978

The real racists don't wear jack boots, they were suits, or pant suits. They continue with their greedy efforts to arrange for migrations that will lower wages. They pit liberal against conservative. They inflame racial hate and don't give damn about the citizenry. Slowly but surely they chip away at what little freedom we have left with their endless "war on terror." Profits and power is what it's all about.

[American Dream]

There are racists on high, down below, and in between, just as there are fascists and others with far right leanings at all levels.

What matters most is the organization of the greater society. The state is not so much of an monolithic entity as it is commonly held to be. Rather it is a more of a place where competing interest groups get to hammer out their differences and build some sort of working consensus, as possible.

The problem with those on high- be they big time racists and authoritarians or just ordinary neoliberals like Killary Clinton is that they have so much more power than the angry white men who make up the majority of the far right in North America. Some of those angry white men may be revolutionaries who want to overthrow everything, some may claim to want to create prefigurative communities for the separatist future they envision, but more end up supporting the status quo for various reasons (Trump, etc.)

There have long been jobs available for the angriest white men defending the interests of the really big men- intimidating, maiming and killing for the big boys. They are a reserve army of enforcers for the big boys, too- so it really is a complex ecology.

Beware of those who would simplify the picture too much!

[seemslikeadream]

Trump: ‘There Is Nobody Less of a Fascist Than Donald Trump’