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Tara Carreon
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 Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 10:59 am Post subject: Bailing Out Corporate America is Not Socialism, It's Fascism |
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| Webster Griffin Tarpley wrote: | Excerpt from PROJECT DEMOCRACY'S PROGRAM -- THE FASCIST CORPORATE STATE (April 1987), by Webster Griffin Tarpley
http://www.naderlibrary.com/democ.projdemocprogfascistcorportarpley.htm
Mussolini's corporate state
After the March on Rome in 1922, and especially after the consolidation of a full-blown dictatorship through the coup d'etat of 1925, the Kingdom of Italy saw the creation of the fascist corporate state. The promise of creating corporations figured prominently in Mussolini's demagogy from the beginning of his campaign for the seizure of power, but the creation of the corporations and the transformation of the parliament in order to include them was a long and drawn-out process that was completed only in the late thirties at the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War.
One of the reasons it took so long to found the corporations was the lack of agreement about what these artificial creations might in fact be, since they had to be invented ex novo. Mussolini in the end settled on the idea that each corporation was to represent, not a stratum of society, but rather a branch of industry. The essence of the fascist corporations was that they were a support and appendage of the personal rule of Il Duce, and thus of the one-party fascist state. As one historian has observed:
"The fundamental truth, however, is that the Fascist State claims the right to regulate economic as well as other aspects of life, and has aimed at accomplishing the former through the Corporate organization. The Dictatorship is the necessary rack and screw of the Corporate system; all the rest is subordinate machinery." [Note 2]
Mussolini rejected both the Marxist idea of class conflict as well as what he called economic liberalism. The corporate system was designed, in his view, to overcome the class struggle of the one and the exaggerated economic individualism of the other. All of this was supposed to mobilize and focus national energies in the service of the superior interest of the state as the overarching collectivity. In one speech, Il Duce summed up the three elements of revolutionary corporatism as a single party, a totalitarian state, and "the highest ideal tension." In fact, Mussolini danced to the tune of Venetian financiers like Volpi di Misurata, Cini, and others.
Mussolini situated the need for corporations in the context of the dissolution of the world capitalist system -- an interesting parallel to the corporatist fascism of Project Democracy and the Trilateral Commission, which are explicitly proposed as necessities for a post-industrial era of scarce and diminishing resources. In 1933, Mussolini announced that the world depression (or the "American crisis," as he also called it) had become a total crisis of the world capitalist system. He went on to distinguish three periods in the history of capitalism: "the dynamic, the static, and the declining." According to Mussolini, the dynamic era of capitalism extended from the introduction of the widespread use of the steam engine to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870; this period he saw as the time of unfettered free enterprise. After 1870, came a static phase, with the growth of trusts, the end of free competition, and smaller profit margins. The third or decadent phase is described by Mussolini as a kind of state capitalism.
The outcome is the necessity for corporatism:
Today we are burying economic liberalism, and the Corporation plays that part in the economic field, which the Grand Council and the Militia of the squadristi do in the political. Corporativism means a disciplined, and therefore a controlled economy, since there can be no discipline which is not controlled. Corporativism overcomes Socialism as well as it does liberalism: it creates a new synthesis.
(Finer, pp. 501- 502)
The juridicial basis for the fascist corporations is established in the Charter of Labor of 1927, whose sixth article states:
The corporations constitute the unitary organization of production and represent completely its interests. In view of this complete representation, the interests of production being national interests, the corporations are recognized by law as organs of the State. [Note-3]
The regime created fascist labor unions for workers, which had the monopoly of representation of labor in the negotiation of the national labor contract for each category or branch of economic activity. The Confindustria was created as the sole syndicate of the employers. No labor contract was considered valid until it had been approved by the Ministry for Corporations.
In 1934, Mussolini finally issued a decree-law creating 22 corporations for the principal sectors of the Italian economy. Each corporation was given a council, which was composed of equal numbers of representatives of the fascist labor union and the fascist employers' organization for that sector, plus representatives of the National Fascist Party, the Ministry of Corporations, and consulting technocrats. The president of each corporation was generally a top official of the government or of the Fascist Party. The leading task of each corporation was the reconciliation of disputes between labor and management.
Each corporation represented a "productive cycle" rather than an occupational category. A first group of corporations included agricultural, industrial, and commercial elements. These were the corporations for:
1) cereals;
2) garden products, flowers, and fruits;
3) vineyards and wine;
4) oils;
5) beets and sugar;
6) animal industries and fishing;
7) wood; and
8 ) textile products.
A second group of eight corporations included only commercial and industrial elements. These were:
1) metallurgy and mechanics;
2) chemical industries;
3) clothing and accessories;
4) paper and the press;
5) building construction;
6) water, gas, and electricity;
7) extractive industries; and
8 ) glass and ceramics.
A third group of corporations made up the service sector:
1) insurance and credit;
2) professions and arts;
3) sea and air transportation;
4) internal communications;
5) show business; and
6) tourism and hotels.
In the early stages of the regime, corporate representatives were brought together at the national level in a National Council of Corporations, and a National Assembly of Corporations, which were later superseded by a Central Corporate Committee. All of these contained additional party and government representatives in addition to the corporate delegates. In addition, Councils of Corporate Economy were set up in each province as a kind of fascist chamber of commerce, with all the corporations of the province plus local governments being represented.
In 1938, after having proclaimed that he considered the Chamber of Deputies, which until that time had been the lower house of the Italian Parliament, as belonging to the alien residue of liberalism, Mussolini replaced that Chamber with the Chamber of the Fasces and Corporations (Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni). This was composed of a number of delegates appointed by each of the corporations, plus other delegates appointed by the National Fascist Party.
Mussolini summed up these institutional transformations with the following words:
"We have constituted a Corporative and Fascist State, the State of national society, a State which concentrates, controls, harmonizes, and tempers the interests of all social classes, which are thereby protected in equal measure. Whereas, during the years of demo-liberal regime, labor looked with diffidence upon the State, and was, in fact, outside the State and against the State, and considered the State an enemy of every day and every hour, there is not one working Italian today who does not seek a place in his Corporation or syndical federation, who does not wish to be a living atom of that great, immense living organization which is the national Corporate State of Fascism."
(Field, p. 16)
After the cataclysm of the Mussolini regime, former members of the fascist hierarchy who considered themselves in the syndicalist-corporate tradition, such as Giuseppe Bottai, accused Mussolini of having been instinctively inclined to preserve his personal dictatorship, rather than transform that dictatorship into a true corporatist system. From beginning to end, the corporations were in fact the merest paraphernalia of Il Duce's one-party state. Although he actually functioned as a malleable puppet of Volpi di Misurata and the Venetian financiers, in the eyes of the world Mussolini stood atop the fascist edifice as Duce of Fascism and Head of Government, and the secretary of the National Fascist Party served at his pleasure. An important organ of this totalitarian dictatorship was the Grand Council of Fascism (Gran Consiglio del Fascismo), primarily an expression of the fascist party, but in its makeup a mixed organ composed of top officials of the National Fascist Party, government ministers, the Presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, the commander of the squadristi, and others. As long as the Chamber of Deputies lasted, it was the Grand Council which made up the single nationwide list of Fascist candidates which the voters were called upon to accept or reject as a single unitary slate. The Grand Council was also responsible for submitting to the King the names of persons who might be selected as Head of Government. It was this Grand Council which, in July 1943, decided to oust Mussolini.
As will be shown later, the National Endowment for Democracy is not only corporatist, but its board of directors is intended to function as a kind of informal Grand Council of Fascism in the totalitarian one-party state that Project Democracy seeks to create in the United States.
After seizing power, Mussolini institutionalized and domesticated his storm troopers, the squadristi, under the name of the Voluntary National Security Militia, which was an organ of the Fascist Party. To combat political resistance to his regime, Mussolini then set up Special Tribunals whose judges were all high officers of the squadristi militia. Perhaps Ledeen or other Project Democracy theorists can take this as a starting point for the reform of the U.S. federal judiciary.
Mussolini claimed to justify his regime through the need for efficiency and getting things done effectively. The Second World War revealed the overwhelming logistical and military weakness of the fascist corporate state. Despite the failure of corporatism in its declared aims of generating economic and military power, corporatist forms have exercised an almost hypnotic fascination over certain financier cliques in times of grave economic crisis. One such financier was Bernard Baruch, whose wholly controlled operative, Gen. Hugh Johnson, was the leader of the National Recovery Administration during the first administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The organizations that were supposed to be created in each sector of production around the NRA code for that sector were a very transparent copy of the fascist corporations. Many of the brain-trusters in the first New Deal were declared admirers of Mussolini, and even went so far as to prepare a summary report on the fascist corporate state for President Roosevelt. As we will see, the Trilateral Commission is committed to a neo-corporate order for the United States.
At this point in the argument, certain readers may become impatient with an argument that seems to them to be incongruous. Can it be that the business-suited bankers of the Trilateral Commission, the shirt-sleeve bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO, or even such figures as Oliver North share decisive elements of their ideology with a black-shirted, jack-booted, strutting fascist like Mussolini, with fez, dagger, and club, with jaw jutting over the balcony of Palazzo Venezia? Are not the present-day figures of Project Democracy too bland to qualify as fascists? Are they not just American pragmatists with views that may happen to differ from our own?
It may come as a surprise to many that Mussolini himself was a professed follower of American pragmatism. Among the thinkers who had made the greatest contribution to his own intellectual formation, Il Duce numbered first of all William James, the classic exponent of American pragmatism, whom he knew especially through the Italian writer Papini. Then came Machiavelli (certainly not a pragmatist and clearly not understood by Il Duce), followed by Nietzsche, who must be considered as representing a slightly different school of pragmatism. Then came the French anarcho-syndicalist, Georges Sorel, the theorist of purgative violence and also a declared pragmatist.
All pragmatists are not necessarily fascists, but in the 20th century many have been, and there is no doubt that all fascists are pragmatists. In a crisis of civilization like the one of the 1980s, the fascists constitute the fastest-growing component of the pragmatic school. This makes it possible for individuals like Oliver North and Carl Gershman to embrace fascism as a simple practical expedient.
In one of his speeches, Mussolini remarked: "The second foundation stone of Fascismo is represented by anti-demagogism and pragmatism." William Yandell Elliott of Harvard University remarks in his study of post-World War I political irrationalism, entitled The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: "For pragmatism, a myth is true so long as it works. Mussolini offers himself as the new Caesar .... If he can capture the imagination of Italians and inflame them with his dream, he feels that he can govern with consent." (p. 341) Elliott, it should be recalled, was one of the principal teachers of Henry Kissinger.
William James had posited this "working test of truth," which was also reflected in Mussolini's celebrated contempt for programs. When asked for a program, he replied: "Our program is simple: We wish to govern Italy. They ask us for programs, but there are already too many of them." For Mussolini, program was a part of liberalism's "government by talk," which he was determined to extirpate. In 1932, Mussolini wrote: La mia dottrina era stata la dottrina dell'azione. Il fascismo nacque da un bisogno d'azione e fu azione. (My doctrine had been the doctrine of action. Fascism was born of the need for action, and was action.) Oliver North would presumably agree. |
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Tara Carreon
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Location: Tucson, Arizona
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| Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 9:59 am Post subject: |
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| TROUBLETOWN , BY LLOYD DANGLE wrote: |
LIFE UNDER SOCIALISM
HAVEN'T YOU HEARD? AMERICA IS SOCIALIST! BUT IT'S A FUNNY KIND OF SOCIALISM -- BASED ON THE TEACHINGS OF GOLDMAN SACHS THE FINANCIAL CORPORATION -- IT'S SOMETIMES CALLED SACHSIALISM.
CHILDREN WILL BE NAMED AFTER HENRY PAULSON AND TAUGHT STOCK PICKING.
>>GOOGOO GAGA ALTRIA AT 52-7/8 STOP.
THE TROUBLED ASSETS OF MISMANAGED FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS WILL BE SHARED BY ALL.
>>YOUR ASSETS STINK! GET THEM AWAY FROM ME!
EVERYONE WILL RECEIVE A FREE CALENDAR FROM GOLDMAN SACHS EACH CHRISTMAS.
>>A DIFFERENT GOLDMAN ALUM EVERY MONTH!
WORKERS WILL BE DOWNSIZED FOR THE COMMON GOOD.
>>MY PINK SLIP MADE THE S & P GO UP 2-1/4.
AMERICANS WILL BE FORCED TO DRIVE A CAR CALLED THE PONTIAC GEITHNER.
>>GOOD THING I'VE GOT BAILOUT ROADSIDE ASSISTANCE.
NO COMPANY THAT OWES GOLDMAN SACHS MONEY WILL BE ALLOWED TO FAIL.
>>WE MUST DO THE RIGHT THING BY THEM.
WRING! WRING!
DEVELOPING AN OBSCENE EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION SCALE WILL BE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED.
>>BUT VOLUNTARY.
EVERYBODY GETS A FREE MEMBERSHIP IN THE HENRY PAULSON HAIR CLUB FOR MEN.
>>A $59 VALUE.
copyright 2009 |
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Tara Carreon
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| Posted: Wed Aug 05, 2009 6:21 pm Post subject: |
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Well, at least let's get it right.
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Tara Carreon
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Posts: 994
Location: Tucson, Arizona
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| Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 11:03 am Post subject: |
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ONLY THE SUPER-RICH CAN SAVE US!
by Ralph Nader
http://www.naderlibrary.com/lit.onlysuperrich.toc.htm
| Ralph Nader wrote: | [Jeno] But in the past twenty-five years, too much corporate power over government policies has thrown our political economy out of balance and reduced government to a short-term handout operation for big business. In a word, I describe the corporate state."
"[Sal] Like Mussolini in his Stato Corporativo?"
[Jeno] "Not bad, Sal, not bad. Keep surprising me." |
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Tara Carreon
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Location: Tucson, Arizona
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| Posted: Thu Dec 03, 2009 10:15 pm Post subject: |
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| Why Bother -- Getting Life in a Locked Down Land, by Sam Smith wrote: | One of the reasons we have such difficulty perceiving our current conditions is our aversion to a single word: fascism. While there is no hesitation by politicians to draw parallels with the Holocaust to justify whatever foreign adventure appeals to them, or for the media to make similar analogies at the scrawl of a swastika, we seem only able to understand -- or even mention -- the climax of fascism rather than its genesis.
So removed is the true nature of fascism from our consciousness that it has even become a fashion statement, as the New York Times' Ruth La Ferla described in a stunningly offhand manner:
The brute aesthetic of fascism -- a blend of classical style and modern functionalism advanced by 20th-century totalitarian regimes -- is widespread these days, having muscled its way from the worlds of architecture and fashion photography onto movie screens and runways ... Fashion's flirtation with fascism has, to be sure, been stripped of its darker political content. Still, the ponderous style identified with tyranny retains an allure. "Fascism -- I hate to say it, but it's sexy," said Ned Cramer, a senior editor at Architecture magazine. The style generally is attractive, he said. "It expresses the idea of taking and then relinquishing control" ...
The aggressive style of totalitarianism retains a power to seduce because it "comes from a lineage of darkness," said Yeohlee Teng, a New York fashion designer ... Brutal granite and travertine structures, the dictator's pet mode of propaganda, "are all about power," Ms. Teng said, "and power is the greatest turn-on."
Italians, who invented the term, also called it the estato corporativo: the corporatist state. Orwell rightly described fascism as an extension of capitalism. It is an economy in which the government serves the interests of oligopolies, a state in which large corporations have the powers that in a democracy devolve to the citizens.
Today, it is no exaggeration to call our economy corporatist, defined by British scholars R.E. Pahl and J. T. Winkler as a system in which the government guides privately owned businesses towards order, unity, nationalism and success. "Let us not mince words," they said. "Corporatism is fascism with a human face."
The Nazis had their own word for it: wehrwirtschaft, semantically linking wehr (for defense, bulwark, weapon) with wirtshaft (for housekeeping, domestic economy, husbandry) to describe an economy based on the assumption of warfare. The concept was not new, however. "William Shirer points out in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that 18th- and 19th-century Prussia devoted 70% of its revenue to the army and "that nation's whole economy was always regarded as primarily an instrument not of the people's welfare but of military policy."
In Hitler's Germany even the pogroms were part of national economic planning, seizing Jewish shops and companies and replacing Jewish workers with the Ayran unemployed. Hitler argued that "private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy," and denounced "the freedom to starve," in a country which had known as many as six million without jobs. Wrote Shirer, "In taking away that last freedom, Hitler assured himself of the support of the working class."
The link between business and fascism was clear to German corporatists. Auschwitz was not just a way to get rid of Jews, it was also a major source of cheap labor. As Richard Rubenstein points out, "I.G. Farben's decision to locate at Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria by which contemporary multinational corporations relocate their plants in utter indifference to the social consequences of such moves." I.G. Farben invested over a billion dollars in today's money at Auschwitz and, thanks to the endless supply of labor, adopted a policy of deliberately working the Jewish slaves to death.
In such ways do economics and freedom become intertwined. Those who think it can't happen here should consider that four days before Mussolini became Premier he met with a group of industrialists and assured them that his aim "was to reestablish discipline within the factories and that no outlandish experiments.... would be carried out." In Friendly Fascism, Bertram Gross notes that Mussolini also won "the friendship, support or qualified approval" of the American ambassador, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Thomas Lamont, many newspapers and magazine publishers, the majority of business journals, and quite a sprinkling of liberals, including some associated with both The Nation and The New Republic.
Little we do as individuals will matter much if we make the same mistakes as the liberal democrats of pre-Hitler Germany and Italy. If we lose the precious product of a struggle for free will that began only a few hundred years ago, no one will later ask us if we want it back. |
http://www.naderlibrary.com/lit.smithwhybother.toc.htm
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Tara Carreon
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| Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2010 1:36 am Post subject: |
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http://www.naderlibrary.com/lit.pentagonists.toc.htm
| A. Ernest Fitzgerald, The Pentagonists wrote: | Just as the Pentagon contractors' bad work habits and worse management practices were encouraged and spread throughout the United States' corporate body, so did the notion of corporate communism. Every big corporation seemed to think it had a right to be kept alive, no matter how poorly it performed. The sloppier and more unsuccessful the management, the more it insisted on bailouts and protection from competition. The very thought that favored giant business firms should compete for the trade of consumers with free choice was somehow abhorrent to the defenders of privileged status for the big corporations. The suggestion that a changing economic climate demanded that dinosaur companies adapt or die bred panic. The pampered giants had become so grossly fat, so lethargic, and so nonproductive that their most strenuous efforts were periodic campaigns for more public money and more protection.
The evolving corporate welfare system was brilliantly described and analyzed by two British academics, R. E. Pahl and J. T. Winkler, in "The Coming Corporatism" (Economic Affairs, March-April, 1975). By their definition, corporatism is a political-economic system under which government guides privately owned businesses toward four goals: order, unity, nationalism, and "success."
Order, they said, "meant the elimination of the anarchy of the market in all its forms (including extreme success or failure for capital or for labor). This desire for stability emanates from a revulsion against the market processes that lead, on one hand, to the collapse of major companies in important industries ... and, on the other, to excessive speculation and windfall profits."
Unity is the "substitution of cooperation for competition. This desire for collaborative effort arises from a revulsion against the perceived wastefulness of competitive struggles."
Nationalism is the "elevation of 'general welfare' to complete priority over self interest or sectional advantage."
"Success" is the "attainment of national objectives established by the state.... it means giving conscious direction to the economy by establishing priorities and targets and by restricting work done toward alternative objectives. First and foremost, this means the control and concentration of investment and of the allocation of resources."
The authors were writing about corporatism in Britain; American academic writers prefer the more palatable "industrial policy." Pahl and Winkler had a less bland description: "Let us not mince words. Corporatism is fascism with a human face." They went on to say, "An acceptable face of fascism, indeed, a masked version of it, because so far the more repugnant political and social aspects of the German and Italian regimes are absent or only present in diluted form." Corporatism, they said, takes over "the core elements of the economic strategy" of old-fashioned fascism. "Corporatism is a distinct form of economic structure. It was recognized as such in the 1930s by people of diverse political backgrounds, before Hitler extinguished the enthusiasm which greeted Mussolini's variant." That is true; many economists of the 1930s admired Mussolini's reorganization of the Italian economy along corporative and syndicalist lines. By setting up special parastate agencies or "corporations" to replace failing or inadequate private enterprises, he was able to control the important economic sectors. Elitists everywhere found that laudable.
Hitler, with a much more highly industrialized nation, built on and to a great extent integrated the existing large corporations into the government system. The smokestack barons of the munitions industry benefitted greatly, of course.
At first both Italy and Germany seemed to have produced an economic marvel. They had created markets for troubled industries and made jobs for many more workers. Hitler's wehrwirtschaft (roughly, "defense economic system") was very much like our own parastate cartel of giant defense contractors in many respects. It appeared to be a splendid tonic for the economy. Another similarity was that the smokestack barons supported this new order and gave it direction. The Wehrwirtschaftfuhrer role played by Alfried Krupp was similar to that of David Packard in our own day.
Despite the rosy look of prosperity from making more guns than butter, the German and Italian arms economies were nonproductive in a classic economic sense. They did not add much of anything to the infrastructure or to the quality of life, and they weren't competitive in foreign markets. And that meant even more subsidies and protectionism.
In the end, going to war was the only cure. In Hitler's Secret Book, the Fuhrer despaired of competing with the productive capacity and efficiency of the United States, and he spoke of us as "emerging in all fields as the sharpest competition to all European nations fighting ... for the world's markets." He added, "Despite (America's) enormous wages, it no longer seems possible to undercut her prices."
It is tempting to array all the similarities between the 1930s corporate state and today's American military-industrial complex and use them as a predictor of things to come. However, I think the threat we face is from a peculiarly American version of corporatism. In this, our strengths are also our weaknesses. Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo had no chance of making their vast slave empires work in the long run -- the home bases were too small and inadequate. Ours, in contrast, is the largest economy in the world, if we decided to, we could live very well within our own borders, with perhaps a few raids abroad to secure strategic materials or to prevent Grenada from falling into Cuban hands.
Or to teach somebody like Khadafi a lesson. The morning after the April 1986 bombing of Libya by the USAF, my associate Tom Amlie appeared live on Cable News Network and explained that the raid was necessary: "It's that time of year." In other words, military budget time. "The budget's in trouble; aid to the Contras is in trouble," Tom said. And Khadafi was an ideal enemy. As Tom pointed out, he was "not a Christian, he talks funny, and he is probably guilty of most of the things we accuse him of." Tom then got the hook from CNN, but he had made his point.
Most Americans have a deep respect, almost reverence toward the military, from memories of Washington at Valley Forge to the Marines at Iwo Jima. They don't realize that the combination of Pentagon Praetorians and big-corporation executives has nothing to do with heroism and, in fact, almost nothing to do with war except for the occasional bloody spasm to provide an emotional excuse for more big spending. The only thing the soldiers, sailors, and pilots in combat arms service have in common with the Praetorians is the uniform.
It was only natural that corporatism in America should flourish during the eight-year lease of the White House by a sleepy old actor who loved multimillionaires, but it had been well started under his predecessor, whose notable contribution was a scheme called the President's Executive Interchange Program.
In a personally signed directive, Carter told us that this program was "a positive force for marshalling our human resources. Through this effort, both the public and private sectors jointly contribute to greater sensitivity and responsiveness in the interest of all Americans."
No, he was not offering a sensitivity-training course. He was very gently trying to give us a kind of Mussolini message: "Boundary lines between government and business are blurring. The activities of both have become increasingly similar. Each recognizes the need for closer cooperation to achieve its goals." Those goals were:
To exchange management expertise and innovative techniques; To develop a cadre of executives of experience in both sectors (government and private) who could be called to serve on government advisory panels and in higher appointive positions in future administrations.
It was the perfect definition of institutionalized conflict of interest, which is one of the "unifying" aspects of corporatism.
If Carter's interchange program should reach full flower, imagine the pool of executives and generals who could be called to serve on blue-ribbon commissions. Since not all Pentagon acquisition practices have been made legal, and since some of them still leak out and get a bad reaction in the press and from Congress and the public, we'll need blue-ribbon commissions for some time to come. Somebody has to drag the red herring, paint the whitewash on, pull the wool, stack the deck, and otherwise get the world to overlook whatever must be overlooked.
The Carter-era and Reagan-era moves for tighter "nationa1 security" secrecy is another support for corporatism (as well as for larceny). Congressman Jack Brooks gave a stirring description in testimony before the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee on October 15, 1987:
Most of the (security) classification, in my judgment, is not to keep our enemies from finding out information. It is to keep the American people and the Congress from finding out what in God's world various agencies are doing and how they are throwing away money, wasting it. They preach economy and they throw money away like dirt, and lie and cheat, and hide, and dissemble....
Now, that's what their real complaint is, that the people and the Congress might find out what they are doing. Reprogramming money, wasting money foolishly, not enforcing the law, not enforcing safety provisions, all sorts of things, and they just do not want anybody in a position to know to say publicly that, yes, this did happen. They want these people to shut up and go away.
Yet the secret part of the government keeps adding bulk. Tim Weiner, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the "black," or supersecret, budget told a meeting of the Fund for Constitutional Government on April 20, 1988, that one measure of this was the increase in funding for secret programs during Reagan's first seven years. When Reagan took office, the price tag for intelligence and secret military activities was about $12 billion a year. In 1988 it had risen to $35 billion a year. The military portion of that amount had gone from about $2 billion to $18 billion, an increase of 900 percent. That jump suggests how much more the Pentagon, under Reagan, had to cover up. For instance, the Stealth Bomber fiscal atrocities, some of which are beginning to come to light at this writing.
The corporate state always encroaches on individual rights. And one sign of corporatism victorious is court decisions against individual rights in favor of government "security." There is the pernicious practice of making a security clearance and a work permit one and the same, in imitation of the KGB. Take the 1987 case of Navy v. Egan. Egan, a shipyard worker, was denied a security clearance and thus had his job taken away without due process. A majority of the U.S. Court of Appeals panel agreed that Egan was entitled to a fair trial, but Chief Judge Markey dissented. The man couldn't have a trial, he ruled, "because there is no law to apply." The security clearance process, Markey wrote, was "predictive ... judgmental and neither factual nor legal." For the millions of people who needed security clearances to keep their jobs, the single test was the judgment of "responsible military officials."
Markey added that the officials derived their power from the president, and his power flowed from "the President's constitutional mandate to provide for the national defense, U.S. Const., Art. II, Section II." Interestingly, Article II, Section II says nothing of the sort.
When the case went to the Supreme Court on February 23, 1988, the court upheld Judge Markey. This logic, if carried to its conclusion, could permit the (mostly secret) NSDDs to usurp the legislative power of Congress, as usually happens in corporate states. The Reagan administration's push in this direction can be measured by the estimated three hundred or more of these edicts that Reagan issued between February 1981 and mid-1988.
The most dangerous sign of the times in 1988, however, was the slowly gathering consensus in favor of a big budget increase to finance a new spendthrift era at the Pentagon. The Washington Post's lead editorial on April 10, 1988, denounced candidate Jesse Jackson's military spending proposals as a "caricature of a policy" that "no president would try, or, if he did, would not be allowed by either party in Congress to pursue."
And what proposal by the Reverend Mr. Jackson so frightened the Post? A budget freeze like the one sponsored by those dangerous left-wingers Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Denny Smith. The editorialist's notion was a strange anomaly for a newspaper with an excellent reporting staff and plenty of stored information to show what damage irresponsible military spending has done. I called the editorial office to ask for clarification, but I was given no answer.
The adverse consequences of the Pentagon's addictive boondoggling to our economy and true military capability are serious indeed, but the damage to our country's moral fiber is catastrophic. Our Constitution and our laws have been subverted to excuse wrongdoing and to rationalize the wasteful system. Concealment of misdeeds had become an official virtue, and suppression of truth national policy. Sophistry reigns in "intellectual" circles. Government officials, from the majestic office of the president to the lowest, sleaziest procurement office, lie routinely and with impunity in defense of the system. So do leaders of business and academia. Some, though thankfully not most, working people have succumbed to the lure of easy money, of what was called blood money in my youth.
So, the blocks, beams, and lintels of a corporate state are already at the construction site and the foundation has been laid. Anyone who has seen the marble structures built in Rome between 1922 and 1943 will know what it is going to look like. But looks are deceiving: this is meant to be a prison for most of us. |
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Tara Carreon
Veteran
Joined: 25 Sep 2008
Posts: 994
Location: Tucson, Arizona
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| Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2010 11:42 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.naderlibrary.com/lit.crashparty.toc.htm
| Crashing the Party, by Ralph Nader wrote: | | The global corporations have thrown down the gauntlet (see www.multinationalmonitor.org). All the flags, national anthems, and other symbols they and their political minions use to direct public opinion will not mask a genuine patriotism that activates our democracy and addresses our country's needs. Unlike small business, multinational corporations have no allegiance to any country or community other than to control them; indeed, leading corporate executives have said they would prefer to have their companies be "anational" -- belonging to no nation. This growing pattern of expedient transititus sees workers as temporary pawns, government officials as tools, consumers as pliant subjects, small taxpayers as suckers, and voters as necessary for pacification rituals. For such companies, ever merging into larger behemoths, the main event is the maturation of the corporate state, where they control government so it services them daily, socializes their risks and misconduct, and blocks the people from participating in power. Corporate socialism, or the big business takeover of governmental power, has been a long-term strategy pressed into occasional retreat or rebuff by valiant populist cycles of reform. Some of the older conservative economists in the first half of the twentieth century had a keen understanding of this reality. Among them no one was more famous than the Nobel Prize-winning Friedrich A. Von Hayek -- author of the right-wing manifesto The Road to Serfdom. Here is what Dr. Von Hayek wrote in the American Economic Review in 1946: "[M]arket capitalism will have the same inefficient, exploitative outcome as Soviet Communism if the ownership of resources becomes concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer large corporations; and if economic/business decisions come to be made by those relatively few individuals who own and/or operate large concentrated corporations." |
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