GODFATHER GOVERNMENT: A Way Of Life Is Not A ScandalBy Carolyn Baker
March 18, 2007
<snip>
Historians study not only the past but using their analysis of the past, speculate about how the future might unfold. However, historians are not psychics; we can’t predict the exact occurrence of events with specificity, but we can analyze past and current events and conjecture likely future scenarios based on those events. In 1937, during the German Third Reich, historian Robert Brady wrote The Spirit And Structure Of German Fascism, one of the most incisive books of the twentieth century, now out of print and deemed “irrelevant” to contemporary events by most traditional historians. In his last chapter, “The Looming Shadow Of Fascism Over The World,” Brady hypothesized that corporatist influences would ultimately come to dominate many of the governments of the modern world, including and especially, the United States.
Certainly, America’s triumphant emergence from World War II and the subsequent institutionalization of the military-industrial complex established significant components of incipient fascism, as throughout the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency fomented anti-Communist hysteria and right-wing coups d’etat around the world. Meanwhile, at home, McCarthyism gave way to consumerism on steroids and the triumph of the American corporation on all fronts—a feat that had its roots in an obscure Supreme Court technicality in the decision, Santa Clara vs. Union Pacific Railroad in 1886, which declared that corporations were “persons” who had the same “civil rights” guaranteed freed slaves under the Fourteenth Amendment.
While most presidential administrations of the twentieth century gave lip service to government regulation of corporations, a new era dawned in the eighties with Reagan’s “war on government.” It was the beginning of the dismantling of government regulation of industry in America, and it was further exacerbated by a momentous Executive Order signed by Reagan. Executive Order 12615 required departments and agencies to “establish full and ambitious privatization goals.” It also created the Office of Privatization within the Office of Management And Budget to oversee the program and established an independent Commission on Privatization to study and recommend opportunities for privatization within the federal government.
According to Chapter 17 of Webster Tarpley’s The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, Sr. and the research of Catherine Austin Fitts, Reagan’s Executive Order meant that private corporate contractors would no longer have to be accountable for the work they did nor how they used the money allocated to them. As a result, an opportunity for a black budget was created in which government money would be spent without the oversight of Congress and the American people. Clearly, this was a disastrous recipe for fraud and corruption to become standard operating procedure in the federal government.
<snip>
Much more:
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php?p=opedne_carolyn__070318_godfather_government.htmI don't agree with all of this, but I sure as hell cannot dismiss all of it either.
:wow: