Category: Class War

The danger of American fascism

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Written by Henry A. Wallace. An article in the New York Times, April 9, 1944. From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

Henry Wallace was one of two Republicans FDR appointed to cabinet positions; he served as Secretary of Agriculture, and was selected to run for vice president in 1940. He was an unusually progressive thinker, having started school lunches and food stamps during the Great Depression.

His words still ring true today:

On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:

What is a fascist?
How many fascists have we?
How dangerous are they?

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery. The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.
Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after “the present unpleasantness” ceases:
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Matt Damon

~ susie

No happier with Obama than we are:

This is not the man he voted for.

Matt Damon sat down with Piers Morgan for an interview that will air Thursday night, and among other things, talked about his feelings on the first two years of President Obama’s administration. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Damon was a vocal Obama supporter, campaigning for the then-candidate at rallies, promoting him through aMoveOn video contest and attending fundraisers for him.

Now, he’s not so enthused about Obama. When asked if he was happy with the way the President is running the country, Damon said, point blank, “no.”

“I really think he misinterpreted his mandate. A friend of mine said to me the other day, I thought it was a great line, ‘I no longer hope for audacity,'” Damon said. “He’s doubled down on a lot of things, going back to education… the idea that we’re testing kids and we’re tying teachers salaries to how kids are performing on tests, that kind of mechanized thinking has nothing to do with higher order. We’re training them, not teaching them.

One trick Republican ponies

~ susie

Not that the truth has much to do with anything these days, but E.J. Dionne nails it: It’s a lot easier to keep cutting than it is to come up with real solutions. Of course, the current austerity trend has much more to do with the long-term political interests of the Republican’ts, and not the actual needs of the economy:

If you want to get national attention as a governor these days, don’t try to be innovative about solving the problems you were elected to deal with – in education, transportation and health care. No, if you want ink and television time, just cut and cut and cut some more.

Almost no one in the national media is noticing governors who say the reasonable thing: that state budget deficits, caused largely by drops in revenue in the economic downturn, can’t be solved by cuts or tax increases alone.

There is nothing courageous about an ideological governor hacking away at programs that partisans of his philosophy, including campaign contributors, want eliminated. That’s staying in your comfort zone.

The brave ones are governors such as Jerry Brown in California, Dan Malloy in Connecticut, Pat Quinn in Illinois, Mark Dayton in Minnesota and Neil Abercrombie in Hawaii. They are declaring that you have to cut programs, even when your own side likes them, and raise taxes, which nobody likes much at all. Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee has warned of possible tax increases too.

Indeed, to the extent that Quinn received any national press coverage, he got pilloried in conservative outlets in January when he signed tax hikes that included a temporary increase in Illinois’ individual income tax rate from 3 percent to 5 percent.

Despite all the commotion around whether the federal government will shut down, the clamor in the states may be even more important than what’s happening in Washington, which is missing in action on the moment’s most vital fiscal question.

What states are doing to ease their fiscal agonies will only slow down our fragile economic recovery, and may stop it altogether. The last thing we need right now are state and local governments draining jobs and money from the economy, yet that is what they are being forced to do.

As the last three monthly reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed, an economy that created a net 317,000 private-sector jobs lost 70,000 state and local government jobs. Cutbacks are dead weight on the recovery.

The bully boys of Wisconsin

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Here’s the thing we all know: Right-wing Republicans don’t usually win if they’re honest about what they want to do. So in order to be successful, they have to lie, coerce, threaten, manipulate and cheat their way to victory. They can’t lead on the basis of their policies, because so few people support them once they know what they are.

So I’m not all that surprised that they’re trying to bully the Wisconsin Democrats out of their paychecks, their staff and their ability to serve. I’d be surprised if this new resolution is even legal:

MADISON – The 14 Wisconsin state Senate Democrats who left the state two weeks ago will now face fines of $100 for each day they miss, if they miss two or more days.

Republicans remaining in the Senate approved the daily fine on Wednesday morning with none of the Democrats present.

The Democrats left Wisconsin in order to delay indefinitely a Republican-backed bill taking away collective bargaining rights from public employees.

The resolution passed on Wednesday also requires the missing Democrats to reimburse the Senate for any costs incurred during attempts to force them to return. Their salary and other per diem payments can be withheld until they pay back the penalties and costs.

Republicans have already withheld the checks of missing Democrats from direct deposit and denied access to copying machines for their staff.

According to TODAY’S TMJ4’s Mick Trevey, there are punishments incorporated into the resolution which would allow for the removal of offices from senators, to downsize their offices, to take away spending capabilities for their offices for photocopies and office supplies, even to changing the way the staffs are run.

The two-day clock would not begin until Thursday, and if senators do not return two days later, the $100 fines and other measures could possibly begin.

I don’t think Democrats will have a problem raising the money, do you?

In the meantime, the Republicans might want to consider, you know, actually negotiating with the Democrats.

Crying the blues

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

At one point in my career, I tried to untangle the business deals of our local Blues, but it was a Herculean task and I didn’t have the time to get very far. I can tell you that they’re not really non-profits — they have a non-profit shell, and a whole lot of for-profit subsidiaries in most states. The non-profits buy services from the for-profits, which is where the really smelly deals get made.

Oh well!

In a filing to the Massachusetts Division of Insurance yesterday, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts revealed it has committed to paying $11.3 million in severance to Cleve L. Killingsworth, an executive they parted company with last year after the organization began to run “staggering losses”. Nice work if you can get it.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is one of a number of nonprofit insurers called out by Consumer’s Union last year for hoarding excessive amounts of surplus while raising premiums by the double digits. At that time BCBS of Massachusetts defended themselves saying that that level of surplus was necessary to remain sustainable, but this severance package certainly tends to raise the question again – both of regulation of surplus and premium levels, and of the tax exempt status of the organization.

At the moment, these insurers are regulated to ensure that they keep the minimum required in reserves but there is no ceiling set in most states. This has resulted, according to the report, in some plans having five or six times the minimum reserve. Sondra Roberto, a staff attorney for the Consumer’s Union opines, “the mission of a nonprofit is to provide affordable coverage, so we want that mission to be their priority.”

Meanwhile, according to this article in the New York Times yesterday, hundreds of thousands of people across the country are now being cut from the insurance plans that states have been providing for the poor.

Among the states is Pennsylvania where 41,468 people have been cut from the state’s insurance plan for low income people. Governor Rendell had been paying for it partially with payments he had negotiated to be paid into a fund by the four Blue Cross Blue Shields in Pennsylvania. Because they were holding large surpluses, Rendell made the case that the BCBS contributions would prove that they were fulfilling their charitable purpose – but that agreement ran out on December 31 and they stopped making the payments.

From the Times article: “The Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans continue to run substantial surpluses, rising to a cumulative $5.6 billion in 2009 from $3.5 billion in 2002, according to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, a research group that advocates for low-income families. But the insurers say their obligation to pay for a state program has ended. ‘Our support to adultBasic [Pennsylvania’s subsidized insurance program for low-income people] was always a temporary financing mechanism,” said Aaron Billger, a spokesman for Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, the largest of the state’s plans. “We have long told the state that it was unsustainable.”

Uh huh. Right.

That librul media

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

I agree with Will Pitt: They’re scared. And that cheers me up!

Remember the first stirrings of what came to be termed as the “Tea Party” uprising? Never mind that it was created by powerful conservative corporate entities like the Koch Brothers. Never mind that the “Tea Party” was nothing more or less than the GOP base with a new coat of paint. Never mind that virtually everything they were yelling about was based on lies and deliberate misinformation. Never mind that most of them really didn’t know what they were talking about, and couldn’t spell to save their lives.

Three blivets wreathed in American flags and automatic weapons could stand on a streetcorner with signs reading “Keep Your Damn Government Hands Off My Medicare,” and they would find themselves surrounded by camera crews from CNN, MSNBC and, of course, Fox News. But put 50,000 people a day out on the streets of Madison, put tens of thousands more on the streets in every state in the union, and those same news cameras are suddenly too busy covering the Oscars and Lindsey Lohan’s ongoing crime spree to make an effort at coverage.

Hm.

I wonder why this is? We have a huge story in the making here, rife with old and new politics that cuts across virtually every segment of American life – blue collar workers, unions, protests, Tea Party governors, fleeing Democratic senators, teachers, budget issues, new media, old media, and the power of simple shoe leather – and yet those who represent the protesters in Wisconsin had to fight like wolverines to get just one of their representatives onto the Sunday political talk shows. Just one. As far as the American “news” media is concerned, Wisconsin simply doesn’t exist.

Know what I think?

I think they’re scared.

I think the corporations behind the “news” media are conservatives down to their DNA, but understanding that is a matter of simple logic and observation. They made the “Tea Party” into a legitimate political phenomenon by dint of total-saturation coverage. But now, they are trying to disappear the Wisconsin protests by ignoring them entirely. Is it because they don’t like the idea of workers having the right to collectively bargain? Definitely. Is it because this national action scares the ever-lovin’ crap out of them?

I think absolutely yes.

Keep it up Wisconsin. Keep it up, alternative media. Keep it up, America.

They are scared down to their corporate-owned socks, and as this movement grows, it will be impossible to ignore.

Deep thought

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I have an even better idea for Congress to save money: Really big co-pays and a very high deductible on their health insurance. The thinking behind good benefits was that it was supposed to keep them from being corrupted, but as we see, that’s just not working out.

So it’s time to slash their benefits. Cut, cut, cut!

Stop screwing with Social Security

~ susie

Via email. One would think the Senate wouldn’t pass this, but who knows? Better not to assume, as we’ve learned. Call your congress critter!

(Washington, DC) – U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra (CA-31), Ranking Member of the House Social Security Subcommittee, will join a coalition of retiree groups and Social Security Administration workers TODAY, Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 11:00 a.m. (EST) to oppose deep budget cuts to Social Security contained in the recently-passed House Continuing Resolution. The press conference call will draw attention to informational pickets that will occur outside Social Security Administration offices in 84 cities on March 2 at noon local time.

To reduce the federal deficit House Republicans have cut $1.7 billion from the Social Security Administration budget in 2011. That could result in workers being furloughed for up to 1 month over the next 7 months. As a result, Social Security office doors may be temporarily closed, phones will not be answered, and claims processing will grind to a halt. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will be put at risk, and jobs will be cut.

I’m not feeling it

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Insider trading? That’s hardly the worst thing that’s happened over the past few years, and it’s also a civil case, one handled by the SEC, not the Department of Justice. I want to see some bankers sent to prison, not slapped on the hand and fined for less than their annual bonuses. Unless ir results in criminal charges, this is like a parking ticket to these guys — a mere annoyance.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused a former director of Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble of passing illegal tips about those companies to Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group founder who is to go on trial next week on insider trading charges.

The former director, Rajat K. Gupta, is accused of passing along information on the two companies’ earnings as well as word of Warren E. Buffett’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs in 2008.

As a longtime senior executive at McKinsey & Company, Mr. Gupta, 62, is the most prominent business executive ensnared by the government in a wide-ranging investigation into insider trading on Wall Street. He ran McKinsey from 1994 to 2003 and counts as friends and associates some of the most powerful people in business.

In comparison, many of the defendants charged earlier with insider trading were junior traders and lawyers or midlevel executives. Over the last 18 months, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged 46 people with insider trading; of those, 29 have pleaded guilty.