http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=37008443700844, Phil Gramm and Fascism
Posted by McCamy Taylor on Wed Jul-30-08 01:49 AM
I. Why Hasn't Typhoid Phil Worn Out His Welcome With The Republican Party After Engineering the Two Biggest Business Meltdowns of the Century?
Those who have followed the many Phil Gramm scandals closely have probably asked themselves Why the hell would the U.S. business community want this man anywhere near a seat of power in this country? . Despite his PhD and his academic history, every business endeavor which he touches turns to liquid shit----on a colossal scale. Enron’s bankruptcy rocked the business world. UBS, his current company, just wrote off mortgage losses as big as all of last year’s profits and is being sued for $20 billion to boot.
One explanation is that a corporation’s bankruptcy can be an executive’s money making opportunity----if he dumps his stock in time (and avoids being caught by the SEC).
However, when you are rich as sin like the David Rockefellers and Mellon-Scaifes who run this country, generating revenue is no longer your primary focus. The Russian Revolution and the Great War in Europe and the changing borders after WWII taught the uber-rich that the largest fortunes are vulnerable to political change. If you want to hang onto your money, you can’t just own a lot of it. You have to acquire power , too. You need to control the masses, or eventually they will decide that no one person deserves to have so much money sitting in a vault gathering cobwebs while so many others are starving.
The people with the real power are those who buy politicians—presidents---and media empires for their propaganda potential and those who start political movements that can benefit their business interests. Fascism, especially Mussolini style corporate-state fascism appeals to this kind of schemer.
The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and usefu instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management. (pp. 135-136)
Benito Mussolini, 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: 'Ardita' Publishers.
We already have something similar to this under the Bush administration. The oil industry objects to other nations having nationalized oil which U.S. firms are not allowed to exploit? Private enterprise is “insufficient” to persuade these countries to give their oil away the way it used to give it away to Standard Oil? No problem. Bush will invade Iraq for its oil, try to invade Iran for its oil, and attempt a military coup in Venezuela for its oil. Oh, and it will interfere in the presidential election in Mexico for its oil.
II. "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Matthew 19:24) Means Exactly What Its Says
The people who crave power in order to protect their fortunes do not view the world the way that you or I do. For example, when they read the newspaper, stories like the one below do not seem tragic. When they read about a Church shooting, they think to themselves Hmmm. We are making progress.
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jOAQKzY-aOBqDspFkEAV_ZO65vZAD92740DO4 An out-of-work truck driver accused of opening fire at a Unitarian church, killing two people, left behind a note suggesting that he targeted the congregation out of hatred for its liberal policies, including its acceptance of gays, authorities said Monday.
Snip
Adkisson, a 58-year-old truck driver on the verge of losing his food stamps, had 76 rounds with him when he entered the church and pulled a shotgun from a guitar case during a children's performance of the musical "Annie."
Snip
"It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to obtain a job, his frustration over that, and his stated hatred for the liberal movement," Police Chief Sterling Owen said.
Adkisson was a loner who hates "blacks, gays and anyone different from him," longtime acquaintance Carol Smallwood of Alice, Texas, told the newspaper.
After the general public outrage has died down, the right wing will embrace this story. The shooter will become a hero of American fascists. Here was a White man, they will say, who could not get a fair shake in this country, because all the jobs were going to minorities. They will blame Latino immigrants. They will blame women who do not support their husbands. They will call for a return to American values.
They will blame everyone except the political and business leaders who have lead us into recession and now have us poised on the verge of a Second Great Depression. People like Phil Gramm. Because to guys like Adkisson, Phil Gramm and John McCain are supposed to be the ones who will get us out of the mess. People who have been suckered by the right wing in blaming other working class Americans for their poverty, desperately want someone they can count upon to lead them back to the safety of the middle class.
III. The Great Depression Was a Great Opportunity If You Were a Fascist Dictator
Those who have read Studs Turkel’s Hard Times know that the uber-rich did not suffer during the first Great Depression. Not the way that the rest of us did. They hardly seemed to notice the desperation of the men and women struggling to survive. For them, FDR was an annoyance and his policies were a nuisance. The reaction of countries across the Atlantic was more to their liking. They admired Mussolini and Hitler. They craved their own fascist coup.
However, America was and is the home to the independent minded of the world, the ones who long for personal liberty more than the comforts of home. People who are not willing to bow and scrape for their daily bread have been coming to this shore for centuries. Noam Chomsky describes it eloquently here:
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people2/Chomsky/chomsky-con2.html There was a tradition of what was called Republicanism in the United States. We're free people, you know, the first free people in the world. This was destroying and undermining that freedom. This was the core of the labor movement all over, and included in it was the assumption, just taken for granted, that "those who work in the mills should own them." In fact, one of the their main slogans, I'll just quote it, was they condemned what they called the "new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self." That new spirit, that you should only be interested in gaining wealth and forgetting about your relations to other people, they regarded it as a violation of fundamental human nature, and a degrading idea.
That was a strong, rich American culture, which was crushed by violence. The United States has a very violent labor history, much more so than Europe. It was wiped out over a long period, with extreme violence. By the time it picked up again in the 1930s, that's when I personally came into the tail end of it. After the Second World War it was crushed. By now, it's forgotten. But it's very real. I don't really think it's forgotten, I think it's just below the surface in people's consciousness.
Snip
Things like this, they're forgotten in the intellectual culture, but my feeling is they're probably alive in the popular culture, in people's sentiments and attitudes and understanding and so on. I know when I talk to, say, working-class audiences today, and I talk about these ideas, they seem very natural to them. I mean, it's true, nobody talks about them, but when you bring it up, the idea that you have to rent yourself to somebody and follow their orders, and that they own and you work there, and you built it but you don't own it, that's a highly unnatural notion. You don't have to study any complicated theories to see that this is an attack on human dignity.
The core of the anarchist tradition, as I understand it, is that power is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can't prove it, then it should be dismantled.
Bush and Cheney used 9/11 as an excuse to give themselves legitimacy for a few years, by claiming that we were under attack and that we had to surrender our Constitutional rights in order to be safe from physical harm. However, that was a short lived crisis. The problem with 9/11 was the external nature of the threat. It could be contained, excluded and neutralized relatively easily. It did not affect the day to day lives of most Americans. When something worse happened----Katrina---9/11 ceased to matter. Bush failed to respond to Katrina (a disaster that could happen to any American community), and so he proved himself to be illegitimate. His ratings have been in the toilet ever since.
Phil Gramm and the right wingers who are backing him and John McCain---including people like Grover Norquist, who is on record as wanting to “bankrupt” America---want to attack the nation again. They need another 9/11, only this time it has to be bigger, splashier, more lasting. It has to hit every single American and make them deathly afraid, not just for themselves but for their children and grandchildren.
They are trying to do that by attacking the economy of the nation. They know that if we are driven into an economic corner, in which people fear for their livelihood, the president in power at that moment can act like Mussolini. He can use the crisis to forge a new kind of legitimacy ----one based upon American values , which is code for a very un-American fascism.
IV. What is Fascism? (Besides a Word that Annoys the Hell Out of Fascists)
In his book Anatomy of Fascism Robert O. Paxton gives this definition:
Fascism may be defined as 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.
Also, from Paxton, the defining characteristics of fascism:
1.“At bottom is a passionate nationalism”
2.“a sense ofoverwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions”
3.“the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external”
4.dread of the group's under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences”
5.“the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary”
As you can see, there are two main ingredients necessary for a successful fascist coup, a crisis and an enemy . Now, what crisis in the 20th century lead to the heyday of European and American fascism? The Great Depression. When people are homeless, starving, out of work, it is easy to mobilize them to join a political movement that claims it has the answers.
V. If You Believe that a Second Great Depression is Just the Crisis You Need to Convince Americans to Surrender Their Liberties to a Corporate Sponsored State, How Would You Engineer One?
http://losangeles.injuryboard.com/miscellaneous/the-subprime-mess-and-phil-gramm-an-experiment-in-deregulation.aspx?googleid=242468 In 1933, a few years following the stock market crash, Congress passes the Glass-Steagall Act, in hopes that regulating banks will help prevent market instability, particularly amongst Wall Street banks. The purpose of the act is to separate commercial banks that focus on consumers from investment banks, which deal with speculative trading and mergers.
The Glass-Steagall Act provided the proper oversight and entity separation that would prohibit banks and other financial companies from merging into giant trusts (conflict of interests) -- giant trusts or corporations being more powerful, naturally, and having the seemingly limitless capital to lobby their corporate interests, however, with a very myopic scope (particularly when it comes to factoring in potential losses -- most banks, as seen in contemporary times, chose not to anticipate losses in the mortgage market; they presumed home prices would continue to appreciate).
In 1999, former Senator Phil Gramm (who is, incidentally, Senator John McCain's economic adviser and cochairs his presidential campaign) set out to completely gut the Glass-Steagall Act, and did so successfully, replacing most of its components with the new Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act: allowing commercial banks, investment banks, and insurers to merge (which would have violated antitrust laws under Glass-Steagall). Sen. Gramm was the driving force behind the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, as he had received over $4.6 million from the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate donations) over the previous decade, and once the Act passed, an influx of "megamergers" took place among banks and insurance and securities companies, as if they had been eagerly awaiting the passage of Gramm's Act. Everything in between Glass-Steagall and Gramm-Leach-Bliley (i.e. Savings and Loan crisis/bust) was, in large part, the incubation period for what would take place over the nine years that would follow the passage of Gramm's Act: an experiment in deregulation.
Gramm’s deregulation of the banking industry was a formula was disaster, as anyone with a PhD in economics and experience teaching the subject at a college like Texas A&M would know. Funny, that describes Gramm’s resume. He should have known better. Maybe he did know better. Maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. From an article by Patricia Kilday Hart:
http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2767 “The work of this Congress will be seen as a watershed where we turned away from an outmoded Depression-era approach to financial regulation and adopted a framework that will position our financial services industry to be world leaders into the new century,” Gramm said.
Watershed indeed. With the U.S. economy now battered by a tsunami of mortgage foreclosures, the $30-billion Bear Stearns Companies bailout and spiking food and energy prices, many congressional leaders and Wall Street analysts are questioning the wisdom of the radical deregulation launched by Gramm’s legislative package. Financial wizard Warren Buffett has labeled the risky new investment instruments Gramm unleashed “financial weapons of mass destruction.” They have fed the subprime mortgage crisis like an accelerant. While his distracted peers probably finalized their Christmas gift lists, Gramm created what Wall Street analysts now refer to as the “shadow banking system,” an industry that operates outside any government oversight, but, as witnessed by the Bear Stearns debacle, requiring rescue by taxpayers to avert a national economic catastrophe.
Just how bad is the banking crisis? According to the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/business/14bank.html?_r=1&oref=slogin As home prices continue to decline and loan defaults mount, federal regulators are bracing for dozens of American banks to fail over the next year.
Snip
But the troubles are growing so rapidly at some small and midsize banks that as many as 150 out of the 7,500 banks nationwide could fail over the next 12 to 18 months, analysts say. Other lenders are likely to shut branches or seek mergers.
“Everybody is drawing up lists, trying to figure out who the next bank is, No. 1, and No. 2, how many of them are there,” said Richard X. Bove, the banking analyst with Ladenburg Thalmann, who released a list of troubled banks over the weekend. “And No. 3, from the standpoint of Washington, how badly is it going to affect the economy?”
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/jul/09/mccain-adviser-addresses-mental-recession /
Gramm’s response to the banking industry’s misconduct and greed would make a totalitarian leader proud. He blames the victims, calling America a “nation of whiners”, denouncing the press for reporting on negative business news which puts the American economy in a bad light. In the world according to Phil Gramm, an attack upon American business is an attack upon America---welcome to the corporate fascist state. By denouncing individual complaints as “whining”, he expresses disdain for individual liberties and rights in the same way that a more typical political fascist might tell a dissident “Too bad that your mail is being opened by the secret police. That is the price you have to pay so that we can fight terrorism.” Except, in Gramm’s corporate fascist state loss of your home is the price you have to pay so that your bank can remain solvent, and your bank’s solvency is supposed to be tied to national pride and security---even if the bank in question is United Bank of Switzerland and is based in another country.
Gramm’s reaction is just a symptom of a much larger problem, one that we saw when the the U.S. Congress passed its truly draconian credit card debt legislation that was like something out of Charles Dickens. Better to have millions of Americans working the rest of their lives to pay off hospital bills than to force a huge bank to write off a loss. In the 21st century, the life expectancy and education and average income of individuals no longer matter as indicators of the health of this country. Only the strength of our Fortune 500 companies matters when judging our success.
That is what it means to be a corporate fascist state.
VI. Pin the Tail On the Scapegoat
I mentioned that it takes two things to create a fascist coup, a crisis and a scapegoat. If the crisis to be an economic one, then the scapegoat will be our economically and politically most vulnerable workers, a group whom the right wing has been working to vilify for at least six years, Latino immigrants.
http://washingtonindependent.com/view/race-and-the-housing Even when their credit scores were similar, blacks and Latinos were far more likely to get subprime loans than white borrowers during the housing boom, report after report has shown. In majority black and Latino communities, nearly half of all mortgages made in 2006 were high-cost subprime loans, according to research by the Local Initiatives Support Corp.
For people who know how fascism works, it will come as no surprise that Michelle Malkin is the point man in the right wing effort to blame Latino immigrants for the mortgage banking crisis.
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/07/22/open-borders-wachovia-bank-posts-89-billion-loss /
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/06/13/wachovia-banking-on-open-borders /
Well now. It looks like banking on illegal immigration isn’t paying off for Wachovia. The bank’s massive losses and job cuts are the big news rocking the financial sector today
And then there is this:
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/12/open-borders-and-the-mortgage-mess /
It’s the elephant in the room: How much has illegal immigration contributed to the current mortgage mess?
No one in Washington wants to talk about it–even as lawmakers pushed to include a now-dead $25 million earmark for the open-borders activists of La Raza/The Race and are preparing to hand over $100 million to the group and other left-wing organizations as part of the mortgage counseling racket.
Snip
Congress needs to act. We need a full congressional investigation into determining just how rampant the illegal immigration problem is in regards to these mortgage defaults. Much like the savings-and-loan scandals of the 80’s we need to know which banks are catering to illegal immigrants in violation of U.S. law and making these extremely high risk loans putting the economic prosperity of this country in great peril.
If you want something with more substance, this article gives maps
http://undocumentedblogger.blogspot.com/2007/08/illegal-immigrants-face-of-subprime.html "Foreclosure filings rose 9 percent from June to July and surged 93 percent over the same period last year." <4> "Consumer comfort plummeted this week amid turbulence in the stock market and a seemingly infectious crisis in the home mortgage market." <5>
Despite the rising economic crisis, the mainstream media has still not begun to investigate the apparent link between illegal immigration and the mortgage crisis. Instead they hold out hopes that the Federal Reserve will bail us out by cutting interest rates.
Give them a chance. Once the members of the mainstream media see that their corporate masters want them to blame Latino immigrants for our banking woes---and our recession---I am sure that the press will oblige.
In a previous journal called When Does It Become Fascism?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2371537 I make the case that Latino immigrants are being set up to become the scapegoats for the American right wing’s fascist coup, much in the same way that the Jews were made scapegoats by the Nazis.
The Nazis were able to justify their atrocities by claiming that Jewish people were not human. When the right wing claims that it is ok to beat, steal from, shoot or kill a Latino immigrant because they are not citizens, that is just a variation of the German argument. The right wing uses the same language to describe Latinos that the Nazis used to describe Jewish people--they are rapists, they carry disease, they are thieves, they have subhuman intelligence. And now, they are blaming them not just for the loss of jobs but for the failure of banks---as if the mere presence of immigrants somehow forced the lenders to compromise their ethics. This goes back to Paxton's point about an "alien" threat to the "pure" community which is prized above all. In the fairy tale according to Michelle Malkin and the other purveyors of fascism, America will be alright again once it embraces those cleansing American Values ---that you can buy at Wal-Mart (though they were probably manufactured in China).
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