MarxistPC
11th January 2015, 01:15
A few months ago I posted, Rise of The Reactionaries, on this thread and I have recently finished the second of three that will be released. If you want to, please tell me where the argument skips around is incoherent or needs strengthening. Enjoy!
The Fascist Republic of the United States
Fascism isn't a slur to be used against policies and political parties that are reactionary. It actually means something. It is an ideological position that states that the rulers of capitalism, not capitalism itself, is above all else in government, society, and even the health of the planet. In June I wrote about how the basis of a fascist movement has brewed within the United States, by exploring the origins of the Tea Party, and how this base has solidified the station of the economic elite in government. The Tea Party have effectively put into power the heads of industry; beyond public reproach due to their obscure presence to the voter, they control and manipulate the system by their whim. Effectively silencing the American people’s attitudes and opinions on nearly every policy question. As a Princeton study showed in 2014 the United States is no longer a democracy but an oligarchy; in studying 1,779 policy issues to come before the Congress they found that the majority of the American people had no impact on whether or not they would pass or fail. In other words, for over eighty percent of the United States population, democracy does not exist. However as you move up the wealth and income brackets, the rich simply get what they want. As Karl Marx said over 150 years ago, “the bourgeoisie, in the modern representative state, has achieved exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”.
Since June, much has happened within American politics to make clear for all those who are willing to look hard enough, to see that the American government is now a fascist state. Government is controlled completely by its corporate masters, that fund every campaign and endorsement for the collective 545 people in the Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, who run this country. Though differing with past forms of fascism in that the government has not been fundamentally changed, i.e. through it’s constitution, but by judicial decisions, unlimited campaign donations, economic and political blackmail, along with blatant threats, the economic elite have usurped government power, and therefore the will of those it governs. Creating, as Marx would also say, “a world after it’s own image”, the towering heights of the economy have created a system by which they are in total control of, yet wholly unaccountable to. From massive tax breaks and huge subsidies, to a sprawling criminal justice system and a great sense of injustice, to more money than ever before to more poor than ever before, to endless unjustified war with no peace, to torture with no prosecution, American society seems to have been inverted.
Fascism is not an easy charge to make as it’s meaning is so skewed and, for obvious economic and political reasons, it’s historical background is opaque. In an effort to better understand the meaning of fascism I began with the definitive works on the matter, a series of letters known as Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It by Leon Trotsky. While living in Turkey from 1929 to 1934 he detailed the rise of fascism in Italy as Mussolini took power. Describing fascism as, “A plebeian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses”, Trotsky prolifically defined the most dangerous political ideology of the modern era as a power grab by the rich by using the upper classes to take over society.
Describing this phenomenon in the form of the Tea Party, in my piece Rise of the Reactionaries, I analyzed that they are what Trotsky described as the "petty bourgeoisie". In the modern economic climate they are our managers, supervisors, and large-small business owners. They are those who survived the transition to finance capital, but didn't experience the sheer wealth grab that the financial elite did. The Tea Party are, as Trotsky describes the petty bourgeoisie, "an exploited and disenfranchised class... They regard the bourgeoisie with envy and hatred". They are used by the bourgeoisie, "as a battering ram against the proletariat". Finance capital, through political, racial, and religious illusions, have turned the Tea Party against those they manage; blaming the worker for the gains they did not see.
After this successful exploitation of the petty bourgeoisie, Trotsky states that, “finance capital (banking and the credit economy) directly and immediately gathers into it’s hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty: the executive administrative and educational powers of the state together with the military, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, and the trade unions”. Over the past forty years all of this has gone on, leaving the middle and working classes abandoned and destitute. The economy has undergone structural changes resulting in the financialization of everything: housing, healthcare, childcare, automobiles, consumer electronic devices, college education, the military, the prisons, even basic needs such as water are not beyond its grasp. By commodifying, or taking something that had use value (housing or child care) and transforming it into exchange value (something that is available to the public only by whim of the economic elite and their goals, i.e. pricing), American society, along with every movement and motive within it, is controlled by one question: what return can it produce for the master’s of finance capital? (i.e. financial institutions and the largest of corporations)
The ideal of, “gain wealth, forgetting all but self”, is a harsh reality placed in front of the worker today. From childcare to healthcare they have been reconstructed as financial decisions for ourselves, i.e. solutions that we must find in “the free market”, instead of political choices that we as a community should consider implementing. This “financialization” as it’s known has bankrupted our parents generation with nearly 50 percent of all American living at or below the poverty line. Between health care costs, college tuition, and housing, this system of what is called “privatization”, is nothing more than class war. In the media it is portrayed positively or even as a “normal” progression of “the market”. However this “normalcy” has been systematically and methodically constructed for nothing more than finance capital’s gain. By taking from the commons and instilling “private ownership”, finance capital has made it all but impossible to survive for most of the population and simultaneously entangles us all with their fatal fate. “Accumulation by dispossession” as Marx put it, by transforming housing from a place of equity into a bondage of debt by means of financialization, coupled with a rapid change in workplace organization through technology that reduces wages to the same low levels, and the wholesale destruction of unions that paid for college tuition, maintained pensions, and upheld worker’s rights; finance capital has usurped control over the entire economy. However in this finance capital controlled economy, not even the good of the economy or the capitalist system as a whole is taken into consideration when massive short term profit is on the line.
The housing crisis of the United States in 2007-2008 demonstrates finance capital’s pathology clearly. Banks, instead of providing a stable source of income in the housing market, through deregulation and explicit promises of protection by the United States government, financialized it. By penning mortgage deals whose interest rates ballooned out of control, causing families to bankrupt themselves to pay for housing, and simultaneously selling these aforementioned mortgages as if they were stable and safe to municipalities around the world; finance capital demonstrated not only what we might identify as “greed”, but seemingly a total lack of care for the system that provides for them. Demonstrating their negligence in a Senate Banking Committee Meeting by (D) Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, where Warren took to task the head regulator of the Federal Housing Finance Agency for not fulfilling their legal obligation to, “implement a plan that seeks to maximize assistance for homeowners, and take advantage of current programs to prevent foreclosures”, the head of the agency replied, facetiously. that one of their obligations is to protect the assets of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack banks, Warren notes that and goes on to quote a CBO (Congressional Budget Office) study that found if the banks were to agree to, “a modest principal reduction plan it would help over 1.2 million under water homeowners, prevent 43,000 defaults, and save Fannie and Freddie $2.8 Billion dollars”. So why then, if a stable return on capital is what these companies seek, would they not reduce the amount the debtor owes? It is because when finance capital assumes control of the economy, capitalism no longer has “making a profit” as an end, it has become a means to an end. In a word: capitalism is no longer about the return on capital, but about exploitation. The exploitation of everything, by commodifying everything, from worker’s pensions to everyday necessities and housing, finance capital is feudal in character. It consumes and subjugates everything in it’s sight.
Surely, however, through the State the working classes can take vengeance and try to console themselves, by taking their votes to break up, regulate, and dissolve the power of finance capital. The working class could take into their hands the reins of power and nationalize or put into the worker’s hands, the healthcare industry, transportation, child care, college education; outlaw private prison operations and abolish the military industrial complex. However this is impossible in our current system. Not that the working class does not have the votes or the political will to do as it pleases, but the system has been completely reconfigured so that finance capital, it’s masters, and those who do it’s bidding are immune from justice. Whereby the worker cannot vote away the power of his oppressor because the law and the State have been transformed to protect what finance capital does, and claim it’s legitimacy under the guise of “profit”, “efficiency”, and “private property”. As Trotsky says in his essay,The Only Road for Germany, “The bourgeoisie is incapable of maintaining itself in power by the means and methods of the parliamentary state created by itself; it needs fascism as a weapon of self-defense”. In a word: finance capital needs control.
The election process for our government officials demonstrates a major part of this control. Heralded as the best and most fair system of elections in the world, it is the antithesis of democracy. Drenched in corruption, dripping with money and privilege, it is the most anti-democratic electoral process in the western world. As shown in a recent study by one of the most respected political scientists in the United States, the candidate who raised the most money in an election won 97 percent of the time, this system has been contorted to allow for what is known as the, “money primary”. In recognizing these facts we realize just why it is paraded as the best system: it works exactly for those it’s designed for. In this “money primary” those whom the party officials, financiers themselves in most cases, think can raise the most money from finance capital are able to get into the primaries and then go on to be selected based on the wants and needs of finance capital. A famous example of this was during the 2012 presidential race, as many Republican primary stations closed themselves down and even struck Ron Paul’s name from the ballot, as a way to ensure the figurehead of finance capital in that election, Mitt Romney, would gain the nomination. Becoming nothing more than an auction house, the primary and election process amounts to a bidding process for finance capital. Finance capital, in this “money primary”, gathers the election process into a stranglehold, choking out the voter’s choice and will.
The second strategy that finance capital wields is demonstrated in the silence in the case of Ron Paul in the 2012 Presidential race, among the many other issues that are present in our world, meanwhile simultaneously having the air-time to distract us with missing planes and mindless celebrity gossip. The media, unlike what the right-wing rave about, is an institution that is corporate owned and controlled. it has one aim and one aim only: to make as much profit as possible. The way it is seen through the lens of the mega media corporations such as NBC and Time-Warner Cable, it’s that you are the product they are delivering to their advertisers. The more viewers, the more and higher paying advertising spots will be bought. Now there is a double-whammy to this motive: 1. not only do major media companies then put on spectacles such as singing pageants and talent shows to garner and distract more viewers, but 2. the media company is extremely unlikely to take a view of the world that is not in it’s advertisers or it’s own interests. Couple that with that fact that the same financial elite who own the banks also own or are closely tied to the major media conglomerates, i.e. NBC, Disney, and Time-Warner, the view that “the market” is a neutral and even desirable factor of life is promulgated on the airwaves without end.
All of this culminates into a media that distracts and entertains as much of its audience as it can, away from the major issues that they care about and affect them directly. Meanwhile for those they can’t distract with Jerry Springer or the NFL, they present a very fixed corporatized view of the world. Ranging from the topics that are discussed, how the debates are carried out, the time and content restraints, those who come on the program, and the agenda that is set, the corporate media control and virtually frame the way the population thinks. For example, if our only option was to bomb Afghanistan, because it just so happen to be the country that Osama Bin Laden was in when 9/11 was carried out, then we will buy into the propaganda and cow in fear. However if it was discussed that we had in fact trained Bin Laden just a decade prior to 9/11, funding him to the tune of billions, and pointed out, rightly, that Saudi Arabia played a much larger role in financing the terror operation, not to mention that had the media told of the simple fact of Afghanistan’s willingness to capture and turn over Osama bin Laden in exchange for peace (which was reported everywhere else in the world except for the United States); then the relatively pacifist population might have made the “wrong decision” and opposed the war, as they did so powerfully in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq.
However in a democratic society, since control can’t be taken over people’s actions, i.e. the state using force, then it must be taken in what the population is presented with and allowed to think. Corporate media fixes this problem through projecting a world view that most often is not a deliberate system of coercion, staff from the White House don’t go onto the set of NBC, write the script, and hold a gun to the reporter’s head, but reflects the interests of the powerful institutions and people that they work for. General Electric is the world’s leading maker of weapons for the United States government and it just so happens to own MSNBC and NBC, both of which, during the lead up to the Iraq War, beat the drums of war at a fever pitch (nothing to do with the billions in weapons contracts that GE stood to make, I’m sure).
Killing the electoral process, meanwhile keeping the workers along with the petty bourgeoisie bound up in political illusions, leaves power completely seized in the hands of finance capital. In doing this, it uses it’s power of illusion to create in the public mind a view of the world that is greatly skewed. Through it’s owning of the press, both educational and informative, it creates an image that says, “The market has always been here, and always will be. It is a static constant of life that is neutral in the world.” By lulling the worker, through the media, the press, and the educational system, with the idea that the market is the one place that you can remedy your problems that the government refuses or is outright incapable of solving. It becomes one that is a fundamental assumption of all economic, political, cultural, and social orders. By destroying the unions, controlling the political process, and owning the press, finance capital creates a world where it is everywhere and nowhere; where it controls everyone and everything.
This exploitation by finance capital can only be described as one thing: Fascism. The complete taking over of the state, control of the entire economy, coupled with turning human relations between people (in the personal sphere and political) into financial decisions that, by proxy, enrich finance capital, while simultaneously alienate the workers from one another, all culminate into a fascist society. Finance capital cannot abide a limit, it must look everywhere for new exploitation opportunities in government, in the environment, in human relations, etc. Even consuming contemporary business, as it bulldozes all those who refuse to assimilate to it, it hollows out the economy from the inside; eventually it will destroy itself. As one of the most respected financial commentators in the world, Martin Wolf, stated in the London Financial Times,”(finance capital) is eating out the modern market economy from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid.”
This fascism, that has attacked and ultimately taken over our government, is best demonstrated in the politics behind and the passage of, The Cromnibus Spending Bill of 2014. Through the election that they bought, that I described in my June article, finance capital immediately used its power to manipulate a provision into the spending bill which would provide them the ability to trade in derivative swaps. The same derivative swaps that were so destructive, yet so profitable, in the 2008 financial crisis, have been legalized yet again for the gain of finance capital. In fact out of $1.1 trillion dollars, it contains over $600 billion dollars in subsidies to private industry, a provision to allow over ten times the amount current amount of 32,500 to $325,000, for donations to the national Democratic and Republican parties, along with cutting $350 million dollars to the IRS, which in a CBO study found that for every $1 you cut you add $7 to the deficit. All culminating into a political and financial extortion by the big banks (i.e. Citigroup; whom the American taxpayer bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars). Through pressuring the legislators whom they financed and will hire after their stint in the Congress, and by having President Obama, (the president they elected by being his biggest funders in 2008), tell the CEO of Citigroup to call members of Congress instructing them to pass the bill, they have shut out the workers voice. Though all of this might demonstrate control of the government and the media, in it’s failing to report any of this, where does the exploitation come in? Sneaking secret clauses into spending bills is nothing new; why worry about this one?
In this provision of the bill, not only were 70 of the 80 lines written directly by Citigroup, but the money that will be used to gamble in the derivatives market will be your money. Congress gave authorization to the largest banks to use your bank account balance as capital for their bets. Not only do these banks have more money than they know what to do with, but now they want yours as well. If any losses were to occur with that money, the FDIC will be forced to reimburse the banks with taxpayer dollars; ensuring the banks massive profits and none of the risks. Though the theme of: all the profits go to us and all the costs onto you is common theme in American capitalism, this level of exploitation, so brazen and craven in nature, goes above and beyond what was previously thought of as tolerable for the Congress to approve and the media to ignore.
To see fascism in action on the proper scale, that is involving the state, the military, the media, coalescing in the interests of finance capital, the prospect of “terrorism” is our mark. I put this in quotes not only because of it’s dubious meaning but also because of it’s even more hypocritical application, especially within the media and the government. The State Department’s definition of terrorism: politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agent; could and, in fact, should be used to describe nearly every militaristic and covert operation the United States has undertaken since it’s signing of the United Nations charter in 1945. None of the countries. i.e. Korea, Nicaragua, Chile, Vietnam, Lebanon, Haiti, Cambodia, Laos, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, etc, posed, what the United Nations Charter calls an, “imminent danger” to the United States. In fact those countries are so far away and so militaristically insignificant, most people within the United States, if polled, wouldn't be able to point them out on a map.
Mentioning these invasions and acts of terrorism as such, instead of “humanitarian” and “liberating missions” is unthinkable. In high society, generally comprised of those who have internalized the values of power and finance capital, there are things that it just wouldn’t do to say. Pointed out by George Orwell, “in Britain (generalizing to the western world) the truth can be suppressed without the use of force”. In those cultures and communities in which news is produced, the newsrooms and the universities that produce the journalists, the thought that the United States could be subverting peace or actively working to create chaos in the world is just unthinkable. In fact a media study done by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in the book Manufacturing Consent, showed that when a “peace process” was discussed in the media the United States backed and supported it 100 percent of the time.
But what is meant by terrorism is what “they” (our enemy at the time) do to us (the United States and it’s allies). Often the actions of those who are crazed fanatics with obvious mental issues, “lone-wolves” as their known, are characterized by the media as the single greatest threats to United States in history. The facts and statistics don’t bear that out, however what is shown are the disparities between the “different” acts of terror that are perpetrated. I put different in quotes because in the media not only are our acts of terror benevolent and even humanitarian, but depending on your skin tone and religion your motivation in killing mass numbers of people are stark and drastic. If nuance is there, between Christian’s who commit acts of terror and Muslim’s who commit acts of terror, it’s extremely subtle and often non-existent. However there is a divide created by the media to fulfill the narrative that brown men from foreign lands want to hurt you, and that narrative is very useful in stirring up fear and support for militaristic actions in the Middle East. However those acts of terror committed by white Christians are insignificant due to their uselessness in finance capital’s goal of exploitation of what is calls, “one of the greatest material prizes in world history”, i.e. the Middle East oil reserves.
Take for example the terror attack perpetrated in January of 2015, as the headquarters of the famous Charlie Hebdo newspaper in France were raided by, seemingly, a group of Islamic radicals who were allegedly seethingly outraged at the newspaper’s portrayal of Muhammad. The right wing within the United States had a field day with this, incidentally, and had wall to wall coverage for days. all explaining how this should justify an even more aggressive and phobic stance against Muslims and Islam. Fox News immediately zeroed in on the, alleged, religion that the attackers had, Islam, and demanded that the White House denounce the act as “Islamic terrorism”, in order to serve the purpose I outlined earlier. With calls by the panelists on national television for the continued and in fact accelerated militarization of the police, greater arming of the American public (where we already have more guns for every man woman and child, outranking Yemen and Serbia where Civil Wars are or have recently taken place), along with one stating that, if it already wasn’t clear enough, “We know they were speaking unaccented French and had ski masks on… we don’t know what color they were, what the tone of their skin was, what if they didn’t look like typical bad guys”.
This fascism, this coordination and driving of the public agenda and politic by finance capital through the media, has created a feeding frenzy on our fears and our insecurities for the better part of fifty years. Culminating in the allowance of extremely racist, xenophobic, and islamophobic remarks to be said on the largest cable news station in the world. This is exploitation at it’s finest point, done to us, through the media, using tragedies to stir up public hatred and fear of contrived false images of an “other” in order to achieve a goal on behalf of the powerful. Driving us to war and conflict, while ignoring and intensifying the pain here at home, via “budget cutbacks” and “austerity” which has thrown millions of the already struggling into crushing, grueling poverty. War actually means something, just like Fascism does, it means to perpetrate massive acts of violence, pain and misery on your fellow human beings. It’s not that our bombs somehow hurt less and save lives, which the statistics show ours are far more destructive and devastating, but to go to war in a Fascist state is not only to declare it on others but ingrain in ourselves. War becomes something that is an everyday occurrence, you just hear it in passing on the news or are scared into committing it and then cut to your favorite singing competition. As Smedley Butler, a retired Marine and Medal of Honor recipient, once said, “war is a racket and always will be. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, and surely the most vicious”. Fascism must be undone, through organizing and popular struggle. Not only is the fate of our democracy on the line but the fate of our world.
Throughout the 2014 mid-term elections the Republican ticket, which was for the third time funded almost entirely by the oil billionaire Koch Brothers, they promised to create jobs, help the working class, and “take our (their) country back”. Well that all went away on the first day of the 114th Congress and we learned exactly who the “we” they were talking about was; they immediately set to work on the issues that mean most, not to their voters or districts, but to their funders. The Koch Brothers own Koch Industries and I highlighted their role in the 2012 elections in Rise of The Reactionaries, as the main donors of the Republican party, to the tune of $500 million dollars. Newly elected Republicans in the Senate passed a bill onto the House, whereby the Keystone XL would be built. Even though Barack Obama, the political “opposite” of the Koch Brothers, has promised to veto the construction bill if it comes to his desk, this matters little to the henchmen of finance capital. Already having betrayed their base with fantasies of change and replacing John Boehner with a Tea Party candidate, they have set also set to work on cutting Social Security and Medicare, which their base along with the American people, strongly oppose, but their donors (leaders) strongly endorse.
The Kochs own the company, TransCanada, who is currently trying to ram through the Keystone XL pipeline that would run through the heartland of America, and they have pushed very hard to make it a reality. Through the media in 2014 and beyond, they have launched an all out assault with commercials, radio & internet advertisements, along with having representatives go onto television whenever the construction of the project came up. In fact according to Media Matters, a fact checking group, overall the media endorsed the pipeline an overwhelming 61 percent of the time, not singling out Cable news which topped the charts at an astounding 75 percent endorsement to 7 percent opposing viewpoint. This has culminated and, I would argue directly correlated with the the spot on 61 percent public support for the pipeline. Promising jobs and “energy security” and Barack Obama glowing in his announcement that “under his presidency they had built more than enough oil pipeline to cross the world three times over, the unsuspecting viewer couldn't help but wonder, “Why not build one more pipeline?”
Unfortunately the facts regarding the Keystone XL and it’s environmental impact is just written off and never discussed, because in the media, “the climate debate it not over yet”, and their high-paying advertisers such as the Kochs would not approve of that messaging. However the effect of this pipeline are real and have been captured by a photographer, Garth Lenz, who says in his TedTalk, “The mining efforts being taken upon are amongst the most devastating the world has ever seen before… The large nature of these mines and the need to dig as deeply as possible, leave most mines being larger than that of Victoria, British Columbia. There are ten of them, and another forty of fifty in the approval process, and no mine has been rejected for approval, it’s nothing more than rubber stamp. The oil that is eventually produced is the most greenhouse gas emitting fuel available on Earth, at the same time destroying the world’s largest and amongst it’s last carbon sinks.” These oil sands that TransCanada and the Koch Brothers want to exploit must be ripped from under some of the most precious wetlands and forests in the world: the Boreal Forests in Alberta, Canada. They among few others, are considered by scientists to be the last remaining, “carbon sinks” (places where carbon dioxide is inhaled and oxygen is burped out) in the world. In fact a NASA scientist was quoted as saying, “If the Keystone XL pipeline is built, it’s game over for Earth”.
All of this exploitation of the environment, to the point of exhaustion, is done purely for reasons of profit. The Koch Brothers, according to BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast, are looking to cut out the Venezuelans out of the oil market, where the United States gets a substantial amount of it’s oil and they want to prevent the same from happening in developing countries like India and Russia. So they decided to build this pipeline, first to the Pacific, however the native American populations have said no and kicked them out, now they've turned to the Gulf of Mexico. They are planning to ship it out to markets like China and other developing countries where it will be sold there. What are the returns we see? As far jobs go there will be likely fifty or so long term jobs, and just a few thousand construction jobs for a little over a year. However with the environmental impact it will have, will likely ring through the next century, leading to even more rapid and destructive climate change, most likely sealing our fate. Meanwhile in the contemporary the pipeline will spill, as all pipelines do, however due to the size of it, the EPA estimates the Keystone XL will have to spill well over 12,000 barrels a day, or (503,000 gallons of heavy crude oil) all over the floor of some of the last freshwater reservoirs and fertile farmland in the United States. However none of these costs or stakes are taken into account by the politicians, the media or the the Koch Brothers when this pipeline is being built. In fact the only time the Koch Brothers would take these devastating facts into consideration would be to account for all of them and then ensure that they don’t have to pay for them, or “externalize” them. What’s a sustainable future for your children and grandchildren when short term profit is on the line?
Once again we come back to the exploitation and control of everything under it’s eye. Fascism implements these changes on behalf of the financial elite to ensure that it’s profits are made and it’s hands are clean of the mess afterwards. As Karl Marx described the pathology of the rich 150 years ago, “first me, then come the floods”; the fate of the planet is threatened and even pushed to the brink when finance capital has it’s sway over the state, the media, and the military. All along the way slowly but surely dragging us down into their milieu of deranged greed and selfishness. This time however the price won’t come with world war, but most likely, if the course continues, with the wholesale destruction of the Earth, the only place we have ever called home. This time the consequences won’t be paid with the blood of soldiers and the screams of war, but with the lives of our grandchildren and everything that lives on this planet. This time we must win, and defeat them once and for all.
The Fascist Republic of the United States
Fascism isn't a slur to be used against policies and political parties that are reactionary. It actually means something. It is an ideological position that states that the rulers of capitalism, not capitalism itself, is above all else in government, society, and even the health of the planet. In June I wrote about how the basis of a fascist movement has brewed within the United States, by exploring the origins of the Tea Party, and how this base has solidified the station of the economic elite in government. The Tea Party have effectively put into power the heads of industry; beyond public reproach due to their obscure presence to the voter, they control and manipulate the system by their whim. Effectively silencing the American people’s attitudes and opinions on nearly every policy question. As a Princeton study showed in 2014 the United States is no longer a democracy but an oligarchy; in studying 1,779 policy issues to come before the Congress they found that the majority of the American people had no impact on whether or not they would pass or fail. In other words, for over eighty percent of the United States population, democracy does not exist. However as you move up the wealth and income brackets, the rich simply get what they want. As Karl Marx said over 150 years ago, “the bourgeoisie, in the modern representative state, has achieved exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”.
Since June, much has happened within American politics to make clear for all those who are willing to look hard enough, to see that the American government is now a fascist state. Government is controlled completely by its corporate masters, that fund every campaign and endorsement for the collective 545 people in the Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, who run this country. Though differing with past forms of fascism in that the government has not been fundamentally changed, i.e. through it’s constitution, but by judicial decisions, unlimited campaign donations, economic and political blackmail, along with blatant threats, the economic elite have usurped government power, and therefore the will of those it governs. Creating, as Marx would also say, “a world after it’s own image”, the towering heights of the economy have created a system by which they are in total control of, yet wholly unaccountable to. From massive tax breaks and huge subsidies, to a sprawling criminal justice system and a great sense of injustice, to more money than ever before to more poor than ever before, to endless unjustified war with no peace, to torture with no prosecution, American society seems to have been inverted.
Fascism is not an easy charge to make as it’s meaning is so skewed and, for obvious economic and political reasons, it’s historical background is opaque. In an effort to better understand the meaning of fascism I began with the definitive works on the matter, a series of letters known as Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It by Leon Trotsky. While living in Turkey from 1929 to 1934 he detailed the rise of fascism in Italy as Mussolini took power. Describing fascism as, “A plebeian movement in origin, directed and financed by big capitalist powers. It issued forth from the petty bourgeoisie, the slum proletariat, and even to a certain extent from the proletarian masses”, Trotsky prolifically defined the most dangerous political ideology of the modern era as a power grab by the rich by using the upper classes to take over society.
Describing this phenomenon in the form of the Tea Party, in my piece Rise of the Reactionaries, I analyzed that they are what Trotsky described as the "petty bourgeoisie". In the modern economic climate they are our managers, supervisors, and large-small business owners. They are those who survived the transition to finance capital, but didn't experience the sheer wealth grab that the financial elite did. The Tea Party are, as Trotsky describes the petty bourgeoisie, "an exploited and disenfranchised class... They regard the bourgeoisie with envy and hatred". They are used by the bourgeoisie, "as a battering ram against the proletariat". Finance capital, through political, racial, and religious illusions, have turned the Tea Party against those they manage; blaming the worker for the gains they did not see.
After this successful exploitation of the petty bourgeoisie, Trotsky states that, “finance capital (banking and the credit economy) directly and immediately gathers into it’s hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty: the executive administrative and educational powers of the state together with the military, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, and the trade unions”. Over the past forty years all of this has gone on, leaving the middle and working classes abandoned and destitute. The economy has undergone structural changes resulting in the financialization of everything: housing, healthcare, childcare, automobiles, consumer electronic devices, college education, the military, the prisons, even basic needs such as water are not beyond its grasp. By commodifying, or taking something that had use value (housing or child care) and transforming it into exchange value (something that is available to the public only by whim of the economic elite and their goals, i.e. pricing), American society, along with every movement and motive within it, is controlled by one question: what return can it produce for the master’s of finance capital? (i.e. financial institutions and the largest of corporations)
The ideal of, “gain wealth, forgetting all but self”, is a harsh reality placed in front of the worker today. From childcare to healthcare they have been reconstructed as financial decisions for ourselves, i.e. solutions that we must find in “the free market”, instead of political choices that we as a community should consider implementing. This “financialization” as it’s known has bankrupted our parents generation with nearly 50 percent of all American living at or below the poverty line. Between health care costs, college tuition, and housing, this system of what is called “privatization”, is nothing more than class war. In the media it is portrayed positively or even as a “normal” progression of “the market”. However this “normalcy” has been systematically and methodically constructed for nothing more than finance capital’s gain. By taking from the commons and instilling “private ownership”, finance capital has made it all but impossible to survive for most of the population and simultaneously entangles us all with their fatal fate. “Accumulation by dispossession” as Marx put it, by transforming housing from a place of equity into a bondage of debt by means of financialization, coupled with a rapid change in workplace organization through technology that reduces wages to the same low levels, and the wholesale destruction of unions that paid for college tuition, maintained pensions, and upheld worker’s rights; finance capital has usurped control over the entire economy. However in this finance capital controlled economy, not even the good of the economy or the capitalist system as a whole is taken into consideration when massive short term profit is on the line.
The housing crisis of the United States in 2007-2008 demonstrates finance capital’s pathology clearly. Banks, instead of providing a stable source of income in the housing market, through deregulation and explicit promises of protection by the United States government, financialized it. By penning mortgage deals whose interest rates ballooned out of control, causing families to bankrupt themselves to pay for housing, and simultaneously selling these aforementioned mortgages as if they were stable and safe to municipalities around the world; finance capital demonstrated not only what we might identify as “greed”, but seemingly a total lack of care for the system that provides for them. Demonstrating their negligence in a Senate Banking Committee Meeting by (D) Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, where Warren took to task the head regulator of the Federal Housing Finance Agency for not fulfilling their legal obligation to, “implement a plan that seeks to maximize assistance for homeowners, and take advantage of current programs to prevent foreclosures”, the head of the agency replied, facetiously. that one of their obligations is to protect the assets of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack banks, Warren notes that and goes on to quote a CBO (Congressional Budget Office) study that found if the banks were to agree to, “a modest principal reduction plan it would help over 1.2 million under water homeowners, prevent 43,000 defaults, and save Fannie and Freddie $2.8 Billion dollars”. So why then, if a stable return on capital is what these companies seek, would they not reduce the amount the debtor owes? It is because when finance capital assumes control of the economy, capitalism no longer has “making a profit” as an end, it has become a means to an end. In a word: capitalism is no longer about the return on capital, but about exploitation. The exploitation of everything, by commodifying everything, from worker’s pensions to everyday necessities and housing, finance capital is feudal in character. It consumes and subjugates everything in it’s sight.
Surely, however, through the State the working classes can take vengeance and try to console themselves, by taking their votes to break up, regulate, and dissolve the power of finance capital. The working class could take into their hands the reins of power and nationalize or put into the worker’s hands, the healthcare industry, transportation, child care, college education; outlaw private prison operations and abolish the military industrial complex. However this is impossible in our current system. Not that the working class does not have the votes or the political will to do as it pleases, but the system has been completely reconfigured so that finance capital, it’s masters, and those who do it’s bidding are immune from justice. Whereby the worker cannot vote away the power of his oppressor because the law and the State have been transformed to protect what finance capital does, and claim it’s legitimacy under the guise of “profit”, “efficiency”, and “private property”. As Trotsky says in his essay,The Only Road for Germany, “The bourgeoisie is incapable of maintaining itself in power by the means and methods of the parliamentary state created by itself; it needs fascism as a weapon of self-defense”. In a word: finance capital needs control.
The election process for our government officials demonstrates a major part of this control. Heralded as the best and most fair system of elections in the world, it is the antithesis of democracy. Drenched in corruption, dripping with money and privilege, it is the most anti-democratic electoral process in the western world. As shown in a recent study by one of the most respected political scientists in the United States, the candidate who raised the most money in an election won 97 percent of the time, this system has been contorted to allow for what is known as the, “money primary”. In recognizing these facts we realize just why it is paraded as the best system: it works exactly for those it’s designed for. In this “money primary” those whom the party officials, financiers themselves in most cases, think can raise the most money from finance capital are able to get into the primaries and then go on to be selected based on the wants and needs of finance capital. A famous example of this was during the 2012 presidential race, as many Republican primary stations closed themselves down and even struck Ron Paul’s name from the ballot, as a way to ensure the figurehead of finance capital in that election, Mitt Romney, would gain the nomination. Becoming nothing more than an auction house, the primary and election process amounts to a bidding process for finance capital. Finance capital, in this “money primary”, gathers the election process into a stranglehold, choking out the voter’s choice and will.
The second strategy that finance capital wields is demonstrated in the silence in the case of Ron Paul in the 2012 Presidential race, among the many other issues that are present in our world, meanwhile simultaneously having the air-time to distract us with missing planes and mindless celebrity gossip. The media, unlike what the right-wing rave about, is an institution that is corporate owned and controlled. it has one aim and one aim only: to make as much profit as possible. The way it is seen through the lens of the mega media corporations such as NBC and Time-Warner Cable, it’s that you are the product they are delivering to their advertisers. The more viewers, the more and higher paying advertising spots will be bought. Now there is a double-whammy to this motive: 1. not only do major media companies then put on spectacles such as singing pageants and talent shows to garner and distract more viewers, but 2. the media company is extremely unlikely to take a view of the world that is not in it’s advertisers or it’s own interests. Couple that with that fact that the same financial elite who own the banks also own or are closely tied to the major media conglomerates, i.e. NBC, Disney, and Time-Warner, the view that “the market” is a neutral and even desirable factor of life is promulgated on the airwaves without end.
All of this culminates into a media that distracts and entertains as much of its audience as it can, away from the major issues that they care about and affect them directly. Meanwhile for those they can’t distract with Jerry Springer or the NFL, they present a very fixed corporatized view of the world. Ranging from the topics that are discussed, how the debates are carried out, the time and content restraints, those who come on the program, and the agenda that is set, the corporate media control and virtually frame the way the population thinks. For example, if our only option was to bomb Afghanistan, because it just so happen to be the country that Osama Bin Laden was in when 9/11 was carried out, then we will buy into the propaganda and cow in fear. However if it was discussed that we had in fact trained Bin Laden just a decade prior to 9/11, funding him to the tune of billions, and pointed out, rightly, that Saudi Arabia played a much larger role in financing the terror operation, not to mention that had the media told of the simple fact of Afghanistan’s willingness to capture and turn over Osama bin Laden in exchange for peace (which was reported everywhere else in the world except for the United States); then the relatively pacifist population might have made the “wrong decision” and opposed the war, as they did so powerfully in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq.
However in a democratic society, since control can’t be taken over people’s actions, i.e. the state using force, then it must be taken in what the population is presented with and allowed to think. Corporate media fixes this problem through projecting a world view that most often is not a deliberate system of coercion, staff from the White House don’t go onto the set of NBC, write the script, and hold a gun to the reporter’s head, but reflects the interests of the powerful institutions and people that they work for. General Electric is the world’s leading maker of weapons for the United States government and it just so happens to own MSNBC and NBC, both of which, during the lead up to the Iraq War, beat the drums of war at a fever pitch (nothing to do with the billions in weapons contracts that GE stood to make, I’m sure).
Killing the electoral process, meanwhile keeping the workers along with the petty bourgeoisie bound up in political illusions, leaves power completely seized in the hands of finance capital. In doing this, it uses it’s power of illusion to create in the public mind a view of the world that is greatly skewed. Through it’s owning of the press, both educational and informative, it creates an image that says, “The market has always been here, and always will be. It is a static constant of life that is neutral in the world.” By lulling the worker, through the media, the press, and the educational system, with the idea that the market is the one place that you can remedy your problems that the government refuses or is outright incapable of solving. It becomes one that is a fundamental assumption of all economic, political, cultural, and social orders. By destroying the unions, controlling the political process, and owning the press, finance capital creates a world where it is everywhere and nowhere; where it controls everyone and everything.
This exploitation by finance capital can only be described as one thing: Fascism. The complete taking over of the state, control of the entire economy, coupled with turning human relations between people (in the personal sphere and political) into financial decisions that, by proxy, enrich finance capital, while simultaneously alienate the workers from one another, all culminate into a fascist society. Finance capital cannot abide a limit, it must look everywhere for new exploitation opportunities in government, in the environment, in human relations, etc. Even consuming contemporary business, as it bulldozes all those who refuse to assimilate to it, it hollows out the economy from the inside; eventually it will destroy itself. As one of the most respected financial commentators in the world, Martin Wolf, stated in the London Financial Times,”(finance capital) is eating out the modern market economy from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid.”
This fascism, that has attacked and ultimately taken over our government, is best demonstrated in the politics behind and the passage of, The Cromnibus Spending Bill of 2014. Through the election that they bought, that I described in my June article, finance capital immediately used its power to manipulate a provision into the spending bill which would provide them the ability to trade in derivative swaps. The same derivative swaps that were so destructive, yet so profitable, in the 2008 financial crisis, have been legalized yet again for the gain of finance capital. In fact out of $1.1 trillion dollars, it contains over $600 billion dollars in subsidies to private industry, a provision to allow over ten times the amount current amount of 32,500 to $325,000, for donations to the national Democratic and Republican parties, along with cutting $350 million dollars to the IRS, which in a CBO study found that for every $1 you cut you add $7 to the deficit. All culminating into a political and financial extortion by the big banks (i.e. Citigroup; whom the American taxpayer bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars). Through pressuring the legislators whom they financed and will hire after their stint in the Congress, and by having President Obama, (the president they elected by being his biggest funders in 2008), tell the CEO of Citigroup to call members of Congress instructing them to pass the bill, they have shut out the workers voice. Though all of this might demonstrate control of the government and the media, in it’s failing to report any of this, where does the exploitation come in? Sneaking secret clauses into spending bills is nothing new; why worry about this one?
In this provision of the bill, not only were 70 of the 80 lines written directly by Citigroup, but the money that will be used to gamble in the derivatives market will be your money. Congress gave authorization to the largest banks to use your bank account balance as capital for their bets. Not only do these banks have more money than they know what to do with, but now they want yours as well. If any losses were to occur with that money, the FDIC will be forced to reimburse the banks with taxpayer dollars; ensuring the banks massive profits and none of the risks. Though the theme of: all the profits go to us and all the costs onto you is common theme in American capitalism, this level of exploitation, so brazen and craven in nature, goes above and beyond what was previously thought of as tolerable for the Congress to approve and the media to ignore.
To see fascism in action on the proper scale, that is involving the state, the military, the media, coalescing in the interests of finance capital, the prospect of “terrorism” is our mark. I put this in quotes not only because of it’s dubious meaning but also because of it’s even more hypocritical application, especially within the media and the government. The State Department’s definition of terrorism: politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agent; could and, in fact, should be used to describe nearly every militaristic and covert operation the United States has undertaken since it’s signing of the United Nations charter in 1945. None of the countries. i.e. Korea, Nicaragua, Chile, Vietnam, Lebanon, Haiti, Cambodia, Laos, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, etc, posed, what the United Nations Charter calls an, “imminent danger” to the United States. In fact those countries are so far away and so militaristically insignificant, most people within the United States, if polled, wouldn't be able to point them out on a map.
Mentioning these invasions and acts of terrorism as such, instead of “humanitarian” and “liberating missions” is unthinkable. In high society, generally comprised of those who have internalized the values of power and finance capital, there are things that it just wouldn’t do to say. Pointed out by George Orwell, “in Britain (generalizing to the western world) the truth can be suppressed without the use of force”. In those cultures and communities in which news is produced, the newsrooms and the universities that produce the journalists, the thought that the United States could be subverting peace or actively working to create chaos in the world is just unthinkable. In fact a media study done by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in the book Manufacturing Consent, showed that when a “peace process” was discussed in the media the United States backed and supported it 100 percent of the time.
But what is meant by terrorism is what “they” (our enemy at the time) do to us (the United States and it’s allies). Often the actions of those who are crazed fanatics with obvious mental issues, “lone-wolves” as their known, are characterized by the media as the single greatest threats to United States in history. The facts and statistics don’t bear that out, however what is shown are the disparities between the “different” acts of terror that are perpetrated. I put different in quotes because in the media not only are our acts of terror benevolent and even humanitarian, but depending on your skin tone and religion your motivation in killing mass numbers of people are stark and drastic. If nuance is there, between Christian’s who commit acts of terror and Muslim’s who commit acts of terror, it’s extremely subtle and often non-existent. However there is a divide created by the media to fulfill the narrative that brown men from foreign lands want to hurt you, and that narrative is very useful in stirring up fear and support for militaristic actions in the Middle East. However those acts of terror committed by white Christians are insignificant due to their uselessness in finance capital’s goal of exploitation of what is calls, “one of the greatest material prizes in world history”, i.e. the Middle East oil reserves.
Take for example the terror attack perpetrated in January of 2015, as the headquarters of the famous Charlie Hebdo newspaper in France were raided by, seemingly, a group of Islamic radicals who were allegedly seethingly outraged at the newspaper’s portrayal of Muhammad. The right wing within the United States had a field day with this, incidentally, and had wall to wall coverage for days. all explaining how this should justify an even more aggressive and phobic stance against Muslims and Islam. Fox News immediately zeroed in on the, alleged, religion that the attackers had, Islam, and demanded that the White House denounce the act as “Islamic terrorism”, in order to serve the purpose I outlined earlier. With calls by the panelists on national television for the continued and in fact accelerated militarization of the police, greater arming of the American public (where we already have more guns for every man woman and child, outranking Yemen and Serbia where Civil Wars are or have recently taken place), along with one stating that, if it already wasn’t clear enough, “We know they were speaking unaccented French and had ski masks on… we don’t know what color they were, what the tone of their skin was, what if they didn’t look like typical bad guys”.
This fascism, this coordination and driving of the public agenda and politic by finance capital through the media, has created a feeding frenzy on our fears and our insecurities for the better part of fifty years. Culminating in the allowance of extremely racist, xenophobic, and islamophobic remarks to be said on the largest cable news station in the world. This is exploitation at it’s finest point, done to us, through the media, using tragedies to stir up public hatred and fear of contrived false images of an “other” in order to achieve a goal on behalf of the powerful. Driving us to war and conflict, while ignoring and intensifying the pain here at home, via “budget cutbacks” and “austerity” which has thrown millions of the already struggling into crushing, grueling poverty. War actually means something, just like Fascism does, it means to perpetrate massive acts of violence, pain and misery on your fellow human beings. It’s not that our bombs somehow hurt less and save lives, which the statistics show ours are far more destructive and devastating, but to go to war in a Fascist state is not only to declare it on others but ingrain in ourselves. War becomes something that is an everyday occurrence, you just hear it in passing on the news or are scared into committing it and then cut to your favorite singing competition. As Smedley Butler, a retired Marine and Medal of Honor recipient, once said, “war is a racket and always will be. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, and surely the most vicious”. Fascism must be undone, through organizing and popular struggle. Not only is the fate of our democracy on the line but the fate of our world.
Throughout the 2014 mid-term elections the Republican ticket, which was for the third time funded almost entirely by the oil billionaire Koch Brothers, they promised to create jobs, help the working class, and “take our (their) country back”. Well that all went away on the first day of the 114th Congress and we learned exactly who the “we” they were talking about was; they immediately set to work on the issues that mean most, not to their voters or districts, but to their funders. The Koch Brothers own Koch Industries and I highlighted their role in the 2012 elections in Rise of The Reactionaries, as the main donors of the Republican party, to the tune of $500 million dollars. Newly elected Republicans in the Senate passed a bill onto the House, whereby the Keystone XL would be built. Even though Barack Obama, the political “opposite” of the Koch Brothers, has promised to veto the construction bill if it comes to his desk, this matters little to the henchmen of finance capital. Already having betrayed their base with fantasies of change and replacing John Boehner with a Tea Party candidate, they have set also set to work on cutting Social Security and Medicare, which their base along with the American people, strongly oppose, but their donors (leaders) strongly endorse.
The Kochs own the company, TransCanada, who is currently trying to ram through the Keystone XL pipeline that would run through the heartland of America, and they have pushed very hard to make it a reality. Through the media in 2014 and beyond, they have launched an all out assault with commercials, radio & internet advertisements, along with having representatives go onto television whenever the construction of the project came up. In fact according to Media Matters, a fact checking group, overall the media endorsed the pipeline an overwhelming 61 percent of the time, not singling out Cable news which topped the charts at an astounding 75 percent endorsement to 7 percent opposing viewpoint. This has culminated and, I would argue directly correlated with the the spot on 61 percent public support for the pipeline. Promising jobs and “energy security” and Barack Obama glowing in his announcement that “under his presidency they had built more than enough oil pipeline to cross the world three times over, the unsuspecting viewer couldn't help but wonder, “Why not build one more pipeline?”
Unfortunately the facts regarding the Keystone XL and it’s environmental impact is just written off and never discussed, because in the media, “the climate debate it not over yet”, and their high-paying advertisers such as the Kochs would not approve of that messaging. However the effect of this pipeline are real and have been captured by a photographer, Garth Lenz, who says in his TedTalk, “The mining efforts being taken upon are amongst the most devastating the world has ever seen before… The large nature of these mines and the need to dig as deeply as possible, leave most mines being larger than that of Victoria, British Columbia. There are ten of them, and another forty of fifty in the approval process, and no mine has been rejected for approval, it’s nothing more than rubber stamp. The oil that is eventually produced is the most greenhouse gas emitting fuel available on Earth, at the same time destroying the world’s largest and amongst it’s last carbon sinks.” These oil sands that TransCanada and the Koch Brothers want to exploit must be ripped from under some of the most precious wetlands and forests in the world: the Boreal Forests in Alberta, Canada. They among few others, are considered by scientists to be the last remaining, “carbon sinks” (places where carbon dioxide is inhaled and oxygen is burped out) in the world. In fact a NASA scientist was quoted as saying, “If the Keystone XL pipeline is built, it’s game over for Earth”.
All of this exploitation of the environment, to the point of exhaustion, is done purely for reasons of profit. The Koch Brothers, according to BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast, are looking to cut out the Venezuelans out of the oil market, where the United States gets a substantial amount of it’s oil and they want to prevent the same from happening in developing countries like India and Russia. So they decided to build this pipeline, first to the Pacific, however the native American populations have said no and kicked them out, now they've turned to the Gulf of Mexico. They are planning to ship it out to markets like China and other developing countries where it will be sold there. What are the returns we see? As far jobs go there will be likely fifty or so long term jobs, and just a few thousand construction jobs for a little over a year. However with the environmental impact it will have, will likely ring through the next century, leading to even more rapid and destructive climate change, most likely sealing our fate. Meanwhile in the contemporary the pipeline will spill, as all pipelines do, however due to the size of it, the EPA estimates the Keystone XL will have to spill well over 12,000 barrels a day, or (503,000 gallons of heavy crude oil) all over the floor of some of the last freshwater reservoirs and fertile farmland in the United States. However none of these costs or stakes are taken into account by the politicians, the media or the the Koch Brothers when this pipeline is being built. In fact the only time the Koch Brothers would take these devastating facts into consideration would be to account for all of them and then ensure that they don’t have to pay for them, or “externalize” them. What’s a sustainable future for your children and grandchildren when short term profit is on the line?
Once again we come back to the exploitation and control of everything under it’s eye. Fascism implements these changes on behalf of the financial elite to ensure that it’s profits are made and it’s hands are clean of the mess afterwards. As Karl Marx described the pathology of the rich 150 years ago, “first me, then come the floods”; the fate of the planet is threatened and even pushed to the brink when finance capital has it’s sway over the state, the media, and the military. All along the way slowly but surely dragging us down into their milieu of deranged greed and selfishness. This time however the price won’t come with world war, but most likely, if the course continues, with the wholesale destruction of the Earth, the only place we have ever called home. This time the consequences won’t be paid with the blood of soldiers and the screams of war, but with the lives of our grandchildren and everything that lives on this planet. This time we must win, and defeat them once and for all.