Is not the collusion of corporate & government control the essential economic principle of fascism?

[Faryn Balyncd]

[Blue_In_AK]

1. That's funny, I was just talking about fascism with my husband

a bit ago. Yes, we're a fascist country. They keep us mollified by allowing us to bitch and moan about government (unlike Germany and Italy), but the structure is still the same. We have the illusion of being free because we can complain without being jailed (most of the time), but we are all slaves to our corporate overlords.

[dkf]

2. I do believe you are on to something.

Sad.

[H2O Man]

3. Yes.

Recommended.

[branders seine]

4. yup

worked for Mussolini

[laughingliberal]

5. That's the way I've always heard it. Are we there, yet? nt

[MadHound]

6. We've been living in an increasingly fascist country for the past century and a half

There have been bright moments when genuine progressivism and liberalism have beat back the night, but they only last for a few years, a decade or so, then those lights get snuffed out as the darkness closes back in.

Interesting fact, much of Hitler's and Mussolini's inspiration came from various American personages. We planted the seed for things like corporate control of government, eugenics, and such over here, and they got transplanted and flourished in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, aided and abetted by such fine folks as IBM, Henry Ford, GMC, Charles Davenport and others.

For awhile after WWII corporations had to tread carefully lest people draw too close a comparison between them and the failed Axis powers. But that generation has died off and they are feeling much more able to resume their naked control of this country.

[The Doctor.]

10. Very well put.

There has been a slow constriction of our freedom over time. What's truly sad is how blatant it is to anyone willing to look. The problem is the success they've had with controlling the media. The one bright spot has been the internet because they did not foresee its potency.

They're getting around to that too.

[rhett o rick]

7. Yes, but what's your point? Is our government a fascist state or corptocracy?

It only matters what we do about it. Time for a movement.

[Laelth]

8. Indeed, it is, and it seems that is exactly the form of government we have now.

I am truly depressed.

Kill the bill.

Forcing people to buy insurance is no more the answer to a failed health care

system than forcing people to buy houses is the solution to homelessness.

:dem:

-Laelth

[Cleita]

9. Not only that using the force of the government to force people to do what

they don't want to do is totalitarianism that can appear in both fascist and socialist governments. These mandates to force people to buy into private health insurance are just that, totalitarianism being forwarded by a fascist government.

[tblue]

11. Ugh! Excuseme while I explode my head.

What's so sad is how we thought we had this new beginning.

[BrklynLiberal]

12. Still quoting Milton Mayer, after all these years...

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

An excerpt from

They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

<snip>

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

<snip>

much, much more at the site..
If you have the courage to look...

[Vincardog]

13. The defining principal YES

[OHdem10]

14. Benito Mussolinni should know and here is what he said:

"Fascism should be more appropriately called Corporatism.
becauseit is a merger of State and Corporate Powers".

[TiberiusGracchus]

15. Yes. The so-called "third path".