Often in blog posts on the Internet, especially heated political arguments, people start slinging around the term “Nazi,” particularly in discussions of Neoconservative Republicans. Neocons are not “Nazis.” They are in fact “Fascists.” A fascist is one who combines the power of industry, government and the military into totalitarian…total…political control. The Nazis were a Fascist-leaning German political party of the late 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
So, why do we call Neocons “Fascists?” Well, it is pretty obvious. Dick Cheney used a paramilitary organization to replace large segments of the army. The government became much more intrusive in our lives, using private sources in some cases, and controlling investigators, like the regional U.S. attorneys in others and in numerous situations, like the documented cases of rendition, ignoring the law completely.
Then there was the astonishing case of the popular Democratic governor of Alabama who was railroaded, pilloried and deliberately discredited in the Right Wing press, lied about, had votes stolen from his election in the middle of the night, investigated on trumped-up charges by a politically motivated U.S. Attorney, and convicted on the testimony of a plea-bargaining felon to get him into prison. Then he was immediately put away in solitary confinement, unable to speak or contact anyone, with the warden of the prison claiming that he was in danger. This sounds more like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia than Alabama…even Alabama! But it is clearly Fascist.
So Cheney had Congress and he had legislation passed to have our phones tapped and had our library and video store records checked without a warrant, merely the whim of the Vice President and his political advisors. He illegally kept political operatives working in the White House near the President, who was too dumb to be reliable.
Those weren’t even the most serious Fascist acts. Those were merely the early indicators. Now we have the real Fascists actually in power. We have John Kasich in Ohio, and Rick Snyder in Michigan. Kasich is eliminating the bargaining power of the public employees. He is destroying and dismantling the public school system, the backbone and the upwardly mobile generator for our best and brightest young students.
John Kasich doesn’t hide his antipathy for the middle class. It is part of his policy…no unions. Eventually, no middle class at all. He made it out to Wall Street, using his political connections. Now he wants to pull up the ladder and let everyone else stay where they are…a place where he proposes there should be no health care and no Social Security and no pensions. And, by the way, no student loans. Only billionaires and the politicians, like John Kasich, that they own. Like all the other new Neocon governors, he claims poverty while giving millions, perhaps billions in tax breaks to the rich.
Rick Snyder has already, with blitzkrieg speed, passed through a set of laws to try to not only tax people’s pensions…in other words, tax and thereby reduce the amount of money people will have at retirement, but then to take that tax money and give it in the form of tax breaks to wealthy businessmen. Next, he will take the money from local governments and put that into the state’s coffers, which he has and he will give to businesses in the form of tax breaks. So it is take from the middle class and the poor and give to the wealthy.
Rick Snyder knows about the wealthy. To his credit, he educated himself to be a hyper-acquisitions specialist, with an MBA and a law degree. He worked for one of the remaining relatively respected (thus far) accounting firms, Coopers and Lybrand, was President of Gateway Computers and co-founded a successful venture capital fund. Good for him. But where is his experience in running a government?
He has none. He is relying on his philosophy as a fascist. He clearly believes that he should run everything, using private industry and his own identified, unelected, subordinates to run all the communities, if he so desires, in the state of Michigan. Is this an opinion or fact? He just designed, promoted and signed into law a bill to give him dictatorial powers (not unlike the Kings of England during the Revolutionary War) to decide whether a Michigan community is solvent…actually he can take away funds and simply make it insolvent…and then he now has the authority to take over that community, put in his own manager, rather than the officials who were voted in by the People…and if he so decides…sell off all the assets of the municipality to his friends in business. Which he will do.
This goes beyond the Nazis. So if we called Rick Snyder a Nazi we would be wrong. He doesn’t seem to want to put Jews or other nationalities into concentration camps yet. After all, he has not yet drained all the money and assets from the union workers and the public workers and the local communities. He hasn’t sold enough of their property to his rich business associates yet. He hasn’t impoverished an entire state completely yet.
Besides, the German Nazis never took over Frankfurt or Heidelberg and simply installed their own people. They at least left the government intact and any officials who had been voted in. (Until they crossed the Nazis. Then they went on a one-way trip to an internment camp somewhere.)
Scott Walker could, by almost anyone’s standard, be called a smart-assed, smirking, arrogant pig. He never should have been elected, and now, like Snyder, is on the verge of being recalled for lying and for trying to steal the people’s assets. He has done the same thing that Snyder has done and Kasich has done—initiate and enforce legislation with lightning speed to disenfranchise the public employees, reduce their assets, destroy their union bargaining power, so that he can sell of the government assets to big business.
How did these kinds of people come to power? They work for the most regressive, most singularly reactionary political powers…a handful of Right Wing billionaires who want the labor movement destroyed and the people’s security abandoned. Why?
Because these billionaires are not Howard Buffett or Bill Gates. These billionaires want to pollute your land, to drill on public lands and pay no royalties. They want to follow no rules ruin your drinking water or your soil if it will make them rich from natural gas or oil or cutting down the forests.
The only thing between these billionaires and total control of your water, for example, is a Democratic President and Senate. So they discovered that one way around that is to spend $16 million dollars to lie to the people (who now…a little late…are waking up) to elect 29 Republican governors to steal the People blind. Snyder, Kasich and Walker aren’t the only ones. They are only the ones who are being fought against. The other states have already been lost to the Fascists.
What is the next step? Concentration camps? Blackwater thugs at Town Halls? Black ops people with snipers shooting at protestors? Will we become a Central American military autocracy…with mass murders in sports stadiums? How far away is that, and do you really want to find out?
So here is how these governors came into power. Some ignorant farmer from somewhere west of Madison gets the idea that Democrats are giving away the fabric of this country.
Of course, he doesn’t read, even though, thanks to Senator Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin, he went to good public schools and he can read and add and think for himself. That is because—100 years ago–Populists (now Democrats) fought the huge corporations and railroads who wanted to own all the land and control all the politicians.
And now the farmer doesn’t know it, but here they are again today, 2011. The Goulds and Morgans and Vanderbilts and Harrimans wanted to keep the people down. Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin shut them down. The People shut them down. Today the billionaires merely want to take away the farmer’s health care and tax his pension, making it smaller, so that they can give more tax breaks to the rich.
But the Wisconsin farmer only watches television, usually Fox “News” and listens to Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh on the radio. He hears that we don’t need to pay for all these Mexican immigrants or welfare mothers or drug addicts or homosexuals or abortion (which they call baby-killing) doctors. We need more military to kill Muslims in far away countries so that we don’t have to kill them here. (What?) And of course all those dangerous Muslims are living down the street or over in the next community, so we need to be afraid, very afraid.
So what is the farmer to believe…some good old boy…even if a racist-bigot like Limbaugh or a loony-tunes like Beck or some homosexual? Well, the farmer knows a lot of creeps like Limbaugh, even if he tries to go the other way when he sees them on the street. But he doesn’t know any homosexuals and almost no blacks and doesn’t know any Hispanics at all.
So after all this bombardment on radio and television…day in and day out, year after year…the Farmer votes for the safe choice…the Republican Governor-candidate.
Of course the Republican governor candidate says that he is going to create jobs and he is going to cut wasteful spending. What he doesn’t say is that he is going to…try…to create jobs the same unsuccessful way that Republicans have been doing it since Reagan.
What the governor of Wisconsin doesn’t say is that he is going to cut taxes so that he can give tax breaks, both personal and corporate, to his business friends. In order to do so, he is going to cut out subsidies for farmers to buy health insurance and he is going to cut pensions and he is going to end collective bargaining so that he can eventually cut wages and benefits and increase working hours on public employees without union interference.
What the governor is also going to do is to privatize public education. He is going to give the wealthy, who already can afford to send their kids to private schools, a voucher instead of giving their kids a good public education. He’s going to give wealthy people who don’t need it a handout while cutting back public education for people who do need it.
Most of all, Governor Walker of Wisconsin has done what the Fascists always try to do. It is one of the basic principles of Fascism. “Divide and Conquer.” Make people who are in private jobs envy those who are in public jobs and vice versa. Make one jealous and angry with the other so that they won’t notice that both of them are being slammed by giving tax breaks and selling off public lands and community services to the rich.
The farmer tends to forget that the Democrats under Clinton created 22 million jobs to Bush’s 1 million. Rather than leaving us a Depression, like Bush, he left us with a balanced budget…no annual debt. Clinton did raise taxes…on the rich, the top 1%…by merely 4% and created the longest sustained period of economic growth in the country’s history!
Oh, the world is becoming too secular, says the farmer, because 18-year-old girls are no longer virgins and kids play video games rather than baseball. The farmer sits on his air conditioned tractor listening to his radio and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, listening to that funny rhyme about “Barack the Magic Negro.”
While the Right Wing radio strums its merry racist and fascist tunes into the farmer’s head, and he being too lazy to do any thinking for himself, the farmer goes to the polls and elects a Fascist government. And what does a Fascist government do?
It’s pretty simple. They do whatever they want. Kill unions. Kill teacher jobs. Make workdays longer. Make it legal to hire 14 and 15 year olds. Give no overtime. Kill health care benefits. And they take care of the people who are important to them…the Right Wing billionaires who pay Limbaugh and Beck and Hannity…literally…millions of dollars a year (Limbaugh makes $40 million a year) to spew their hate-filled messages.
And while the Republicans are further indebting the farmer to the big prescription drug companies (about $40 billion a year) and while they helped Bush and Cheney lay about the Iraq War (a billion dollars a week!) the Neocon Republicans, not the Democrats, add another $47,000 to the farmer’s government debt.
How about this. Let’s let Rush Limbaugh have something real to scream about. Let’s take away the farmer’s subsidies. Let’s undo all those things that the New Deal gave the farmer to stabilize the rural community and the food supply. You don’t think that’s coming? Don’t you understand free-market Neocon-Republican economics?
When Grover Norquist says he wants to reduce government to the size that he can “drown it in a bathtub” he means employees, social services, and probably long before we get there…subsidies to farmers. As soon as Norquist’s pals, like Scott Walker, think that the farmer is too weak or too dumb to stop them, the subsidies will be gone.
We will have lost all the work that went into 80 years of creating a reliable, affordable food supply and a stable environment for the farmer and rancher. It isn’t perfect and it is not good every year or under all conditions…but a LOT of the risk has been taken out. By Democrats, but not by the current crop of politicians who are Fascists masquerading as what used to be Republicans before Reagan.
What is the real problem? The real problem is that, while we have enormous structural needs in this country, the Republicans will not let us create jobs. And the Wall Street firms, who don’t like being regulated, and want to create another period in the country where they can get rich again…yes, they did get rich on the recent crash…personally rich…will keep the money out of creating jobs and into more speculation.
Does the farmer remember the Populists? Teddy Roosevelt and Bob Lafollette? Well they were Republicans then because the Democrats were Southern Segregationists Now the Southern Segregationists are Jeff Sessions and Jim DeMint and Rick Scott and John Cornyn and Bob Corker.
These are the old confederate states whom Reagan converted from Democratic to Republican by pandering to their very substantial racism. Wisconsin’s union soldiers died fighting against that racism and the idea by Confederates that we are not all created equal.
This is the group whom the Wisconsin farmer wants to hang with? With Confederates and with scum like Scott Walker and Wall Street John Kasich and Rick Snyder who would reduce income to communities, then send in his own private manager to run it because it has less income, then let that manager sell off the best assets to his friends, who then push up prices of services and fees and get rich.
Wisconsin farmers aren’t stupid. They may have been fooled, lied to, once, but they are not dumb enough to let a crook take them twice. They know that if they do, these new billionaires, the successors to the old railroad barons that LaFollette fought to a standstill, will try to take their land, their money, their retirement security and grind them into the dirt.
Rush Limbaugh will continue to tell lies. Billionaires will continue to run commercials telling Wisconsin citizens that the sky is falling. But sooner or later, farmers will wake up. Normally they provide the common sense for the country. God has given farmers good reality-based common sense in abundance. Once they can filter through the lies, no bunch of propagandists like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly or Beck will be able to persuade them that black is white.
Wisconsin voters are symbolic of what has happened around the country. Billionaires, sensing an opportunity when they were able to elect s a few crazies to the Congress, spent a fortune on electing Republican governors and Republican legislators. But now the people have begun to see what they really want to do…cut taxes on the wealthy, eliminate work and retirement security for the middle class…and not only Wisconsin but none of the other states are going to take being looted by Fascists.
For many years there were Populist parties called things like “The Farmer and Laborer Party.” That’s not such a bad idea today. The Fascists can only succeed if they can split the Farmer from the Worker and the Public Worker from the Private worker. All working people must come together to make the country one again.
Once Americans are united again, then our government, under Democrats, will be able to create meaningful jobs and restore our economy. In 1941, it was a war that finally was a large enough stimulus to jump-start an economy that remained prosperous for 40 years until Reagan.
Today the ultimate stimulus may be alternative energy needs, as gasoline, heating oil and natural gas prices begin to climb into the stratosphere. Whatever it is, in order to get there we need to first toss out the Republican Fascists.
