https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/14/its-time-we-called-it-what-it-fascism
December 14, 2020
The epic thrash we’re witnessing is because the forces of
capitalism, seeing a terminal economic crash approaching, are attempting to
preemptively replace democracy with authoritarianism—fascism—so that they can
control the outcome.
When the economy in a democratic but capitalist country fails,
there are two alternatives. You can modify the economic system. Or, you can
modify the political system.
When you modify the economic system (capitalism) but retain the
political system (democracy), you have the arrangement the U.S. has lived under
since capitalism failed in the 1930s, in the Great Depression.
The other alternative is where the economic system (capitalism) is
retained but the political system (democracy) is discarded and replaced with
authoritarianism. This is fascism and is what happened in Germany, also in the
1930s.
The battle between capitalism and democracy is the conflict that is
being fought out in the U.S. right now. The epic thrash we’re witnessing is
because the forces of capitalism, seeing a terminal economic crash approaching,
are attempting to preemptively replace democracy with
authoritarianism—fascism—so that they can control the outcome. A quick look at
history shows us the pattern.
In the 1930s, the U.S. experienced the greatest economic collapse
in its history, the Great Depression. GDP fell by 25%. Bread lines became an
iconic feature of the urban American landscape. Franklin D. Roosevelt put in
place economic policies to mitigate the damage and prevent future collapses.
He put tens of millions of people to work through “alphabetical
agencies” such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Industrial
Recovery Act, and the Works Progress Administration. He imposed FDIC
requirements on banks and insured investor’ deposits. He separated commercial banking from
investment banking and created unemployment insurance and Social Security.
The sum of Roosevelt’s policies saved capitalism from its own
inadvertently attempted suicide. But not everybody was happy with Roosevelt’s
reforms. A cabal of disgruntled bankers attempted a fascist coup d’ etat. It
failed, because the man they had recruited to lead the coup, retired Marine
General Smedley Butler, ratted them out to Congress. But the very fact of the
attempted coup showed just how far capitalists will go to avoid constraints put
on them by democracy.
Clearly, Roosevelt’s reforms worked. He modified the economy from a
purely capitalistic orientation, giving it “guard rails” that would prevent
another collapse. But he kept the country’s small-d democratic political
institutions intact. The result was one of the most buoyant periods of both
economic and political progress the world has ever seen.
The other model of what happens when a capitalist economy fails is
Weimar Germany, also in the 1930s. Germany had suffered three economic debacles
in just over a decade. Those were the loss in World War I, the Great Inflation
of the 1920s, and the Great Depression, the same Great Depression Roosevelt
confronted. But the German response could not have been more different than
Roosevelt’s.
Where Roosevelt had kept the political system intact but modified
the economic system, Germany did the opposite. In January 1933, just 32 days
before FDR was inaugurated, German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed
Adolph Hitler Chancellor. Hitler had promised German elites that he would crush
the civil unrest that had been borne of economic collapse. He kept his promise.
Hitler kept the capitalist system intact, funneling tens of
billions of dollars to weapons makers, financiers, and industrialists. But he
dismantled German democracy. He banned competing political parties, suspended
civil liberties, outlawed trade unions, had thousands of political opponents
murdered, and imposed martial law. This was fascism—the operation of government
for the benefit of corporations and the wealthy. We all know what happened
next.
What can these two polar responses to capitalist economic collapse
tell us about the situation in the U.S. today?
The U.S. economy has been in a four-decades long engineered
decline, which is now accelerating. The owners of capital have intentionally
de-industrialized the economy in order to get their money out. This has put tens of millions of formerly
high paid workers out of work. At the
same time, they engineered a massive transfer of wealth from the working and
middle classes to the very wealthiest. This was Reagan’s supply-side economics.
The data tell the story.
A 2020 study by the RAND Corporation shows that between 1975 and
2018, $50 TRILLION of combined income was transferred from the lowest 90% of
income earners to the top 1%. It’s the greatest episode of internal looting
from one class to another within the same society, ever recorded. This is the
root cause of the widespread, blistering rage that manifests today as Trumpism.
The immediate problem with this scheme was that it didn’t leave
enough income and purchasing power in the hands of people to clear the markets.
Unless something was done to restore the lost liquidity, the economy would fall
into prolonged recession, or depression. The work-around was that the
government began borrowing money at a prodigious rate to plug the holes in
aggregate demand that its income transfers had created. Again, the data tell
the story.
In 1981, when Ronald Reagan took power, the national debt stood at
$1 trillion. In its first 204 years, that was the total amount the country had
needed to borrow. Twelve years later, when Reagan’s Vice President, George H.W.
Bush left office, the debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion. This is the amount
that was needed to offset the transfers and the loss of tax payments to the
government that resulted from Reagan’s upward redistributive policies. But that
was only the beginning.
By 2001, when George W. Bush took office, the debt had reached $5.7
trillion, a large but still manageable sum. Like Reagan, Bush cut taxes on the
wealthy, not once but twice. The result
was that when he left office, the debt had essentially doubled, reaching $11
trillion. Since then, it has more than doubled again, to more than $27 trillion
today.
It’s unfathomable, but it is the measure of the degree of damage
that Reagan’s policies inflicted and continue to inflict on the economy. This
year alone, the government has had to borrow more than $4 trillion just to keep
the ship of the economy afloat. That is
four times what the country had had to borrow in its first 204 years, combined.
It’s almost $11 billion every day.
To put that into perspective, a few years ago, the Chinese
government made a one-time investment of $10 billion to build a national
quantum computing research center. It
has produced a computer that appears to be a trillion times more powerful than
any existing supercomputer in the world. If successful, it will be game over
for all other countries using conventional computers to run their economies, or
militaries. Again, the amount invested to accomplish this was less than one
day’s borrowing by the U.S. government today.
But even $11 billion of borrowing a day is not enough to keep the
economy aright. More than 30 million
Americans are out of work today. Last week, an additional 1.4 million filed for
unemployment insurance. More than 8
million have been added to the poverty roles since the COVID crisis began. As
many as 15 million households with 40 million people face potential eviction
when January rent comes due. Almost half
of all small businesses—48%—fear they may have to shut down permanently. Miles-long bread lines (now in cars) have
returned as an iconic scar on the American urban landscape.
When the whole thing finally collapses nobody can precisely say,
but it cannot be far off. The U.S. is
actuarially bankrupt, meaning that there is no plausible scenario under which
these debts can possibly be paid. At
some point, lenders will stop lending.
When that happens, the government will be unable to deliver essential
services and will have to impose martial law to contain the resulting
disorder. The COVID lockdowns we’re now
living under are a dry run for that time.
Remember, Donald Trump knew in great detail in January just how
deadly the virus was, and just how easily transmissible it is. He intentionally kept this information from
the public while relentlessly undermining any competent public health response.
To put this into perspective, Japan has had a total of 2,462 COVID deaths since
the pandemic started. The U.S. is having more than that number EVERY DAY and
the rate is increasing. This is not an accident. It is not even simply
incompetence. It is intentional.
The wealthy know all of this. That’s why they’ve taken their money
out of the U.S. economy and stashed it in Swiss bank accounts, in tax havens in
the Cayman islands, in new factories and shopping malls and tilt-up cities in
east Asia, and in hedge funds investing in anything except the rehabilitation
of the U.S. economy and its workforce.
Anywhere where their money is out of reach of the U.S. government and
its ability to tax.
It’s why they have sponsored Donald Trump and his swelling legions
of brownshirts and traitorous Republican congressmen to try to overturn the
2020 presidential election. For decades, they were able to carry out their
suppression of democracy through such pedestrian means as gerrymandering,
purging of voter rolls, closing polling places in minority neighborhoods, voter
intimidation, and more. But even those devices are no longer sufficient.
They can see the awakening consciousness of the masses and know
that as long as democracy is still functioning there remains the possibility that
their decades-long heist could be reversed. They are intent that that will not
happen. They will happily destroy the country—meaning democracy—in favor of
fascism rather than have to surrender their ill-gotten gains.
And we should be clear, this is not simply a 2020 phenomenon. They
are playing a long game where, even if they don’t win this year, they will
continue their assault until their end is achieved: democracy is destroyed.
They will be back in 2022 and 2024 more savvy than ever. They’ve learned the
weak points of our system and will attack at the level of county registrars of
voters, state Secretaries of State, state legislatures, and any other weak
points they can manipulate or intimidate to destroy functioning democracy.
The truly insidious goal is to destroy the public’s faith in
democracy itself, so that that selfsame public will not defend the core
institution on which the very country is premised. They have been remarkably
successful at this, with some 70 million people believing that the election was
rigged and that Donald Trump should be installed as an effective dictator,
despite the fact that he conspicuously lost the popular vote by over 7 million
votes, and the electoral college by 74 votes, a “landslide” as he called the
exact same tally in 2016.
The mainstream media have been the central actors selling this
decades-long campaign of dispossession, deceit, and destruction. Every day for 40+ years, while $50 trillion
was being covertly, systematically sluiced from the 90% to the 1%, they’ve
served as cultural pacifiers, agents of diversion, happy chatterers, cooing to
the populace that everything was fine, just as it was supposed to be, that
America is the Exceptional country, and any doubt about that reflected not
political or economic insight, certainly not moral courage, but moral failing,
perhaps even treason, on the part of the doubter.
The media remains the primary agent of deception and deflection
still today. They locate all of the impetus for the democratic overthrow now
underway in the person of Donald Trump himself.
This is an easy sale because Trump is so palpably repellent, so
pathetically insecure and in need of constant attention, and so psychotically
disturbed in his vehement insistence that he won the election and that
democracy must be overturned so that that “fact” can be actualized. Trump is
the political roadside wreck that we can’t stop rubbernecking and the media
milk this for all it’s worth.
In truth, however, the impetus to overturn the democracy is decades
old, is very deeply rooted, is vastly more sophisticated than Trump, and is
only now coming to its apotheosis. It originates in the owners of great wealth,
just as it did in the Great Depression, whether in the U.S. or in Germany. They are the ones who own the media and hire
buffoons like Trump for their ability to deflect rage from the failed economic
system, and redirect it onto manufactured targets like the “deep state,” race,
“socialist liberals” and other imaginary but useful boogie men.
The 126 quisling congressmen who have pushed Trump’s failed Texas
lawsuit are not mainly afraid of Trump, as the media would have us believe.
Trump will soon (we can only hope) be in jail where he will be deprived of his
Twitter megaphone. The bootlickers are afraid of losing the campaign
contributions of these “malefactors of great wealth,” as Roosevelt called them.
They have been called to do what they have been bought to do and they must
comply. They are cowards, traitors, truly moral midgets, but they can count.
The coup d’ etat to replace democracy with fascism is undeniably underway and will not relent until it has succeeded. It will be decided by which side can turn out more people onto the streets once the announcement is made. Right now, it looks like the right, the fascists, with their stormtrooper thugs and gun-toting goons, armed with rage over reason and resentment over reality, have the momentum. They certainly have the agitation, don’t they. We’ll soon find out how much the rest of the country really loves it when we see whether they will fight to save it.
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