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Eisenhower warned us about American fascism« Thread Started

Daily newsbrief journal for October 2005, also see http://www.usdemocrats.com/brief for a global 100-page perpetual brief and follow twitter @usdemocrats


Eisenhower warned us about American fascism« Thread Started

Postby admin » Thu Jan 26, 2012 1:28 pm

Eisenhower warned us about American fascism« Thread Started on Oct 31, 2005, 3:50am » --------------------------------------------------------------------------------Eisenhower warned us about American fascismby Norman Blackread source: http://spofga.org/tax/2005/oct/american_fascism.php This by commentary by Norman Black, deals with the “military-industrial complex”, which Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about, on January 17, 1961, in his farewell speech."In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. "We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." About the author: Norman Black of Norcross, Ga., is a writer and volunteer press relations director of the Georgia Heritage Council. His work includes speeches for Fortune 500 corporate CEOs and presidents, annual reports, and other financial relations collateral. His ongoing studies include politics, economics and the interplay between them.American fascismFascism came to America, in 1947-1948, wrapped in the American flag.That happened only three years after the economic system known as fascism was ended in Germany and Italy, by force, with the victory of the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union over Germany’s fascists, and of the U.S. and British over Italy’s fascists in 1945. (The system, however, remained alive and well in Spain.)This fact seems unrecognized by the U.S. print and electronic press (the press), which reported, on May 8, 2005, that U.S. President George Bush would travel to Europe to take part in celebrations of the end of World War II there. Bush said, “I will take part in celebrations to mark the victory over fascism.” It was, however, not fascism that was defeated in Europe, but a dictator and a demagogue.The press’s confusion exemplifies Americans’ educational conditioning, for most Americans define fascism as dictatorship and socialism as food subsidies for the poor, a national pension system, and national health insurance, a confusion perpetuated by schools, the press, and politicians. Socialism is actually the control of production by those that produce in a factory, on a farm, etc. Food subsidies, national health, and national pension systems are parts of a welfare system that may exist under a dictator, or in a democracy governed by representatives that represent their constituents. Fascism may be either a constitutional system in which the state and corporate leadership are merged, or an economic system run for the benefit of corporations. The form it takes is different in each country and reflects each country’s cultural patterns. When it was forecast, during the 1930 Depression of the 1930's, that fascism would come to America wrapped in the American flag the meaning was that U.S. fascism would be cloaked in American cultural forms.Fascism was known in Europe, in the 1930s, as “corporatism”. It was adopted by Mussolini, in Italy, Hitler, in Germany, and Franco, in Spain. It was also in use in the U.S., during Lincoln’s War (1861-1865) and again during World War I and II. The U.S. economy, during World War II, was actually a very complete command economy, in which the U.S. government controlled wages, prices, and the flow of resources.Many leading Americans and Europeans considered fascism to be a model economy. It was only the combination of fascistic economic policies with political totalitarianism and aggression towards neighboring states by Hitler and Mussolini that caused U.S. leaders to shun the term. Fascism in the U.S. is now called “industrial policy” or “planned capitalism”.U.S. Sen. Henry Clay and Pres. Abraham Lincoln both advocated fascism as a way to build U.S. business. Lincoln, of course, implemented the “American Plan” (as Clay called it) without giving it a name. At the time, however, free enterprise worked well in the U.S., and the tax money Lincoln shoveled to corporations merely added to their profits. The economy is different now, and George W. Bush heads the largest fascist economy in the world. In addition, every other industrialized and developing country also has a fascist economy. Free enterprise, in the U.S., was in abeyance during World War II, and replaced by fascism by 1948. Despite this, U.S. schools, corporations, chambers of commerce and politicians continue to teach that the U.S. has a free enterprise economy, and U.S. governments preach the need for free trade, but only when this suits the needs of U.S. business. Today, free enterprise is so dead that badly run airlines, steel companies, and banks are helped to avoid bankruptcy, by Congress, with tax money. Oil and gas companies are given great tax breaks for doing what their companies incorporated to do. In the international field U.S. tax support of Boeing and the European Union’s support of Airbus, highlight how deeply buried free enterprise is.The $286.4 billion highway bill signed by Pres. George W. Bush, on Aug. 9, 2005, is also a make-work and make-profit law that will enable many construction companies to reap large profits in the coming years. The bill also grants large tax benefits to companies that look for oil and gas, even though that is what those companies were incorporated to do.Worldwide fascismFascism won acceptance, as a result of the worldwide economic depression of the 1930s. Its depth and breadth convinced world leaders that capitalism was dead, and the rich countries’ leaders decided to use tax money to spend their nations out of the Depression. In the totalitarian, fascist countries governmental spending got the countries out of the Depression fairly quickly. Elsewhere, it helped to mitigate the worst aspects of the Depression In the U.S, the form fascism first took was New Deal legislation enacted to combat the Depression. But New Deal spending did not have the desired effect, and the U.S. economy remained depressed. The people that ran the U.S economy, during World War II, were mostly corporate executives that had been called to the capital to direct the economy for the war effort. The U.S. economy prospered, during the war. Industrial production nearly quadrupled and the U.S. Depression ended. The corporate executives running the economy noticed this.Then the war ended and those persons studying the economy expected it to slip right back into depression, because nothing fundamental had changed. This did not happen at once, because there was much pent up consumer demand and people had money with which to buy consumer goods. In 1947 and 1948, however, consumer demand began to drop, and it looked as if the U.S. was headed for another recession, or depression.As a result of the World War II experience with a government-controlled economy, businessmen knew the solution was government economic stimulation. This led to U.S. governmental spending for military purposes, which U.S. governments said this was necessary to prevent Soviet expansion, although it was well known the Soviets had no intention of invading any countries (until Afghanistan, from 1979-1989). Fascism as securityAt that time, U.S. economists, such as Paul Samuelson, said that advanced, high-tech industry “cannot survive in a competitive, unsubsidized free-enterprise economy.” As a result of their World War II experience with a government-controlled economy, they knew the solution was government economic stimulation. By this time the economists had Keynes theory to justify government subsidies. Before that they had done it by instinct.The discussions about how the government should stimulate the economy to prevent depression show there was great agreement that the government should spend for military purposes and not for social purposes. The money given corporations is a subsidy that gives them a small, but important part of their profit. This was not for economic efficiency, since military spending does not redistribute wealth, nor create popular constituencies. The reason was to keep the people from trying to become involved in decisions about how tax money should be spent.The public is not supposed to know this. Stuart Symington, the first Secretary of the Air Force, stated this clearly, in 1948: “The word is not ‘subsidy’. The word is ‘security’.” The U.S. government understood that, for as long as the public accepts that its taxes money will be spent for security and not for subsidies, it will not question.Perpetual threatsPolicy-makers have kept the U.S. public paying for the fascist economy, by continually convincing the people that there is a major foreign threat to their existence. The Cold War and the arms race did that in the latter part of the 20th century, and the Muslim-fundamentalist terrorist threat has now partly replaced it, even though mention is now made of new threats to the U.S. “by the rising military power of China”, to remind that aerospace and military spending must continue. U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) spending, through the Pentagon, was begun to give tax-subsidies to U.S. companies, so as to guarantee them profit and, thereby, ensure the economy remains healthy. It accomplishes this for those that get this tax money. For the DOD’s Pentagon system to function properly, however, citizens must be prevented from interfering in the decision-making processThis is the “Military-industrial complex” Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans to beware of. He did little to eliminate it, in part because of the Korean War and in part because he presented the Congress with no viable alternative.Estimates of the total tax burden of most U.S. wage earners vary, but a low average would be that an individual or family that has wage, salary, and dividend income of $40K to $100K yearly pays about 50% of its earnings in U.S. and state income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes. The government does not want average Americans, the Sam and Sally Sixpacks, to try to tell it how to spend their tax money. It prefers to have them spend their time with sports and religion, so they do not study what the government does. It can then continue to finance the electronics industry, the aircraft industry, computers, metallurgy, machine tools, chemicals, and so on. To keep the public satisfied with how its tax money is spent, the U.S. maintains the constant pretense of threats to the public’s safety. The U.S. also spends billions for crop subsidies and research to develop superior agricultural products, which will enable U.S. agri-business corporations to compete successfully in international markets. Cotton is a good example of this situation. Without these subsidies, U.S. agriculture, even with very cheap legal and illegal workers, could not maintain its competitive position in the worldEven better examples are the tax money shoveled into National Public Radio and PBS (“public” TV), grants to universities for research and to theaters and other “arts” organizations to pay their bills.The attacks in the U.S., on Sept. 11, 2001 resulted from continual U.S. support of repressive, greedy, and unrepresentative governments in Muslim nations, as well as decades of U.S. support for Israel’s gradual destruction of the Palestinians and attacks on its Arab neighbors. However, the Sept. 11th attacks created fear in the U.S. public and gave the U.S. elite the ability to enflame the public’s fears for many more decades. It also enabled the U.S. government to spend more for “security, and through the DOD, as well as to pass legislation that enables it to spy on Americans. The U.S. electorate gladly accepted the new, police-state legislation and traded freedom for supposed security. As a result, it lost more freedom, but did not gain security. The U.S. border with Mexico remains porous. Drugs, illegal aliens, and an unknown number of hostile aliens easily pass across it, and Pres. Bush refuses to let this to be stopped.The need for fascism, corporatism, or state capitalism is explained only in highly specialized publications, which are not easily accessible to the general public. It is not a subject the general-readership and general-viewership print and electronic press in the U.S., care to explain, nor is it explained in school texts.Corporate and political leaders view the U.S. population as potential challengers of their fascist spending policies. They do not want the profits they gain from the U.S. tax money to be challenged. To continue to control the U.S. without internal difficulty, they want the U.S. population quiescent and obedient. Part of the way in which this is controlled is through wholesale legal and illegal immigration into the U.S. from lands where there is either political or religious persecution or poverty. To such immigrants, the U.S. seems like heaven, and they have been politically benign and compliant.(Combinations of the very rich and top corporate managers, in every land, face the same problem. In the U.S., however, effective challenges to current economic policies are exercises in futility. Entrenched economic interests are represented by both Democrats and Republicans, and no mechanism for meaningful change exists within the constitution, except in theory. The police power controlled by the U.S. foredooms to failure possible attempts to make changes outside the constitution. Change will only happen, if continued fascism becomes structurally unsound, or change is imposed from outside.Useful threatsAll post-World-War-II U.S. governments have been excellent at fabricating “threats” to the U.S. The most recent example, the Iraq invasion, is one of the more transparent threat fabrications, but it also shows the extent to which a U.S. government will lie, do what it wants to do, and then lie more to cover the initial lie.The creation of “threats” is easily done. When, for example, the U.S. government wanted to invade Iraq, it needed only to convince the public that Iraq threatened the U.S., and the U.S. government must defend the U.S. public by invading Iraq. Earlier post World War II threats included Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Viet Nam. China is now mentioned, as a rising military power, the implication being that it has no right to arm itself even partly the way the U.S. arms itself. While war with China may not be necessary, publicizing the thought that it challenges the U.S. is necessary, for it helps to continue public approval of the great amount of U.S. spending done for military and aero-space research, development, and products. Pres. Bush lied when he said Iraq posed a threat to U.S. security. The falseness of his statements was shown when, after Iraq was conquered in three weeks, no mass destruction weapons were found there. However, once U.S. troops were in Iraq, it did not matter what the public thought. The U.S. congress said at once, “we must support the troops”. So, billions of tax dollars continue to be spent on the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Almost no oppositional voices have been heard. Along with popular support “of the troops”, most churches and civic groups have become cheering squads that urge “support our troops”. They and pro-war politicians use this argument to cast aspersions, by implication or directly, on anyone that questions keeping the troops in Iraq, or appropriating tax money to keep them there.(The Cuban missile crisis was real, but resulted from the over-exuberant extension of U.S. encirclement of the USSR, which included US missiles in Turkey. Results of the crisis were the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba, US missiles from Turkey, and an unwritten US-USSR agreement that the US would not invade Cuba.)Spending on aero-space development and space exploration is also important in stimulating the economy. If, however, spending for military purposes declined, it would be very difficult for U.S. governments to get U.S. taxpayers to continue to subsidize high-technology industry, as they have done for more than fifty years. Therefore, military spending “to counter the threat” must be high, and a large number of men and women must be in uniform, so the public will see military personnel that use a little bit of what the money is spent for.(Examples of the control of U.S. governments by businesses and corporations abound. Very visible examples of the immense control corporations exert over states’ governors and legislatures have been happening in Georgia, since 2001 A.D. Corporate leaders said the state flag, which honored Georgians that fought for the Confederacy, had to be changed, because it was a threat to economic growth. The specific lie they told was that Daimler would not build a new car-making factory in Georgia, unless the flag was changed. Daimler said the flag was not an issue, and after the flag was changed, chose South Carolina as the location for its new car-making factory. (The governor responsible for the initial flag change was voted out of office and the state elected the Republican party’s gubernatorial candidate gave majority’s in both houses of the Legislative Assembly to Republicans, for the first time in the state’s history. The new governor had promised to allow the voters to state their flag preference in a referendum. However, because of chamber of commerce and corporate pressures he reneged on his promise.(Public boasting about its influence, in preventing the flag referendum, and getting enacted much other legislation wanted by the chambers showed the extent to which the chamber and corporations that fund it control Georgia’s government. (Corporate control of the governments of other U.S. states is similar and is almost total at the federal level.)Business literature has, for more than fifty years, discussed the danger that the people might want to be involved in social and economic policy making. These specialists know, as do economists, that spending for civilian purposes may be more efficient and more profitable than spending for military purposes. They also know there are many more efficient ways to use tax money to subsidize high-technology industry than through the DOD.When a government wants to stimulate the economy, it does not matter what the government spends tax money on. The spending itself is what causes the stimulation. The government may buy military hardware or build roads and hospitals and the economic effects will be the same. Even so, U.S. business leaders think spending for civilian purposes has negative side effects for them. For one thing, it interferes with their managerial prerogatives. Money the government gives corporations through the DOD is like a gift. The government says it will buy what the company makes; pay for its research and development; and allow the company a profit, if it can make one. Corporate managers say this arrangement is the best. They know that, if the government began to have business make products that could be sold in the commercial market that production would interfere with corporate profit making. The production of waste, however, does not interfere, because, for example, no other company will compete with a company that makes artillery, tanks, or B-2 bombers.Non-commercial spendingBecause corporate leaders prefer it, U.S. government spending to keep major U.S. businesses profitable has gone to the military and aero-space industries for the research, development and production of non-commercial products. The DOD, for instance, gives money to corporations to develop missile defense systems that guard against non-existent missile threats. Once a system like that has been developed, businesses then try to find ways to adapt some of its technology for commercial uses.In contrast, other countries give large percentages of their tax money directly to businesses, so the businesses can develop products salable in international markets. Japan is a good example of this. For many decades, It has given tax money directly to Japanese businesses to enable them to develop products that can be sold internationally in commercial, competitive markets. This system is streamlined and not wasteful. It is a stark contrast with the way the U.S. gives money to businesses for military and aero-space research and development. The difference in efficiency between the U.S. and Japanese’ fascist economic systems is the main reason why Japan’s fragile, post World War II economy grew to be the world’s second largest, and Japan competes so successfully with the gargantuan U.S. economy.Japan can give tax money directly to businesses to keep them competitive internationally partly because it has not lied to its citizens and created stories about security threats. The nation has democratic governmental procedures that result in representative governments. As a result, Japanese corporations have not been able to gain complete control of governmental budgets. In turn, the Japanese understand the need to help their corporations and have not objected to governmental grants to corporations to develop new, commercially applicable technology.Control Corporate control of U.S. tax subsidies is of prime interest to U.S. corporate leaders. To them, social spending is a serious threat to their power, for it increases the danger of democracy, because is liable to increase popular involvement in decision-making. For example, if the government were to be involved in building housing, schools, roads, and similar things people would be interested in how the money is spent, because they understand how these things affect them. They would have opinions and would want to tell their elected officials how it should be spent. In contrast, when the government says it will build a stealth bomber, nobody in the public quite understands that and few people offer opinions. Since the first requirement of control is to keep the public passive, those in power want to eliminate anything that tends to encourage the population to be involved in its planning. This is because popular involvement could threaten the power monopoly business has. The people might organize and demand a redistribution of profits and decision-making.The primary and secondary schools in the U.S. play critical roles in keeping the public docile and passive. (This includes tax-supported school systems and parochial and private schools).In primary and secondary schools, teachers teach the half truths and misinformation written into texts by university professors (a.k.a., political indoctrination commissars), and the administrators ensure that teachers inculcate only approved doctrine into the minds of the children and youth sent them to condition. They teach, for example, that the U.S. has a free enterprise economy, the press is a guardian of our freedom, and the political system is representative. The press repeats this.At the higher education level, professors repeat misinformation and diluted, inaccurate history, political science, and economics. They are the guardians, preservers, and ideologues that ward off all challenges to the veracity of the falsehoods they perpetrate. They are in effect political indoctrination commissars. They feel threatened by views that challenge the view promulgated by the state and act as defamation specialists to beat down challenges to those views.They have aptly been described as a secular priesthood dedicated to ensuring that the state’s doctrinal faith is maintained. The press reports their derogatory judgments of those views with which they disapprove as valid value judgments of right-think and wrong-think. Any conversion to an economic system that funnels tax money to social improvement, or national health insurance, or building schools can only be done as part of a total, societal restructuring that is designed to undermine centralized control.In addition, DOD’s wasteful spending cannot be ended until an alternative is agreed to, because the U.S. economy’s well-being depends upon the tax money spent now to keep corporations profitable. In order to change what tax money is spent on, a cultural and institutional structure must also be created, so public funds can be used to improve U.S. citizens’ social needs, such as housing and health care, and societal infrastructure, such as schools, roads, and bridges. If this were done, it would be possible to use tax money to stimulate the economy in a different way than does the current DOD system. These possibilities seem highly unlikely, for those that control a state do not allow change that in any way threatens their profits. Changes in the ways in which the U.S. spends its fascist budget will only happen, if the present ways become structurally unsound, as happened to the Soviet Union, or change is imposed from outside, as in the case of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
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