In 2010, Americans were actually called upon to vote whether or not they would like to create an oligarchy, a ruling elite, that would remove all political power from the average citizen. In some states they voted to do it. Now some are saying that they made a mistake and want a do-over.
In Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida and New Jersey, Right-Wing governors who are known for cutting government and giving the savings to large corporations and the wealthy, won elections. So they did what Neocon Republicans always do. They cut taxes in the billions for the wealthy and corporations. Then they cut health benefits for public workers and eliminated collective bargaining in order to give the workers no organized way to resist.
It is exactly what the Nazis did in Germany in 1933. They were elected with the largest plurality in a parliamentary system. They immediately began to take away the people’s rights, the right to organize and the rights of Jews even to exist.
What is wrong with that? After all, isn’t it what the people voted for? Like our elections where the people voted for Neocon governors. And they came in and immediately began to take away people’s rights.
If you don’t know this, you should; namely, that Fascists do not get elected by saying that they are going to kill and imprison anyone who does not agree with them. That’s really not a good strategy. It is better to start slowly. They start by vilifying anyone who could challenge them. Universities, schools, churches, unions, and opposition parties. They claim that the Fascists, in this case the Neocons, are the only ones with the truth.
Abortion is baby killing. Government debits are caused by teacher pensions that are too high. Wars are necessary even if only against a rag-tag band of 20,000…just so long as they can keep our military occupied. A strong military is important to Fascists. We must, they say, make things fair for “hard working American families.” But they create tax breaks for the rich and loopholes for giant corporations. They don’t imprison leaders of the opposition. But they may take one sample one test, to see if the people have the brains and the courage to understand what is going on.
They will take, let’s say, one governor of a “red” or very conservative state. For “conservative” read “bigoted” or “formerly slave and segregation. They will lie about him, even though he may have had 20 years of very popular service to the state, elected many times.
Then they will steal the election in the middle of the night. Once they have control of government, they will falsely accuse him of some crime, have paid witnesses lie to a jury packed with their own people and stick him not only in prison, but in solitary confinement “for his own safety” where he cannot speak out…and keep him there long enough to make the public forget. And then they watch to see if the people have the courage to resist.
This happened in Alabama. Literally happened to one of the previously most popular (and dangerous to the Neocons) governors and attorney generals that Alabama ever had. But he was Jewish, or had a Jewish name. And you thought that we were beyond all that, didn’t you? We’re not.
With the election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney came the return of the bigots and the return of the KKK-minded substrata of humanity in the South. There have always been lunatic bigots just below the surface in the old Confederate states. Now they run Southern politics from the Senate right down to dogcatcher.
One of the first things that the former Fascist dictators arranged, in Italy and Germany and Spain, was to imprison union leaders. While our Republican Fascists have not imprisoned union leaders, they have killed them metaphorically by simply obliterating collective bargaining. They did it legally, by spending tens of millions of dollars to elect the entire slate of Neocon candidates, using money from Koch Industries, Exxon, the Chamber of Commerce and America’s Health Insurance Plans.
Fascist is an organization that seeks to have complete control over society by allying industry, government, the military and media. Does that sound familiar? They do work for the people. The people they work for are divided into two parts, but both parts have one similarity…loyalty to the party.
If you were a big industry, the Party, the Fascists would let you do as you pleased…hire slave laborers that the Party would provide. You can make a lot of money from slave labor. But, of course, it may be cheaper to simply take the jobs away from local workers and hire slave labor in other countries and allow the industrial Party members to simply hire wage-slaves abroad. (Texas was a slave state. Avowed Texan, George W. Bush would understand that.)
If you were a big industry and you supported the Party exclusively (the Koch family gave for example, close to $1,000,000 to Republican House candidates in the last election, and $50,000 to Democrats (half of which went to one Democratic Senator for her votes on several issues. She was not re-elected.) money.
The people, the voters, are the second part of the Republican equation. If you are a Republican Party member, like the old Nazis, where you had to be a Party member to be considered for a job, you could find yourself in either elected or appointed office. If you do not toe the party line, then, as happened in this last election, you are kicked out of the Party. So the same is true of both industry and individuals…follow the leadership or get out.
A good example of this is the 93 U.S. Attorneys who, when Bush came to office, were all replaced with what were supposed to be good Neocon Republicans. When 8 of them resisted carrying on phony investigations to discredit Democratic candidates prior to election, they were fired. Granted, they were not imprisoned. That comes in the next stage of Neocon Fascism. We already set up the vehicle for it.
It’s called The Patriot Act. Look, this is a Party that sent jobs overseas, worked surreptitiously to elect Fascist governors and held hostage the unemployment benefits of 4 million Americans unless the President agreed to tax cuts for the rich. What is to prevent them—if they took over all three branches of government (they have one now, plus the Surpreme Court)–from using the Patriot Act to declare you a terrorist?
These are people who don’t care if 14 million Americans ever go to work again. They have voted down and stopped jobs bills five separate times in the Senate. You don’t think they could find a way to legally re-define “terrorist” so that it includes you? If they did, to whom would you appeal?
Even if you had the money to reach the Supreme Court, that court has been packed, just as the Nazis did at first, to make their kangaroo courts resemble real judiciary. Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy, were carefully selected for their Right Wing views.
Roberts and Alito in particular were selected for their vicious anti-worker biases. And Scalia’s father was rumored to be a Fascist. Scalia is a staunch Conservative Roman Catholic and has made no attempt to maintain any distance from his close personal relationships with ultra Right Wing leaders. Alliances like this are clearly against the people, in favor of the power elite, and this is the essence of Fascism.
A totaliatarian Fascist state is one which, by definition, makes all decisions for the People. The decision the governor of Wisconsin made for the people was to save them money. Oh, not the average person. When Governor Walker says “them” he means wealthy citizens and corporations. They would get tax breaks amounting to meaning corporations who received $17.6 million dollars. Then the governor decided to cut Wisconsin teacher pensions by about that same amount. And, oh yes, he disbanded the collective bargaining rights at the same time. That is fascism, pure and simple.
The shock that Liberal and Progressive Democrats feel at the legislation against public sector unions demonstrated the enormous change in society. Has the American voter changed so much? The answer is yes, but the reason is far more complicated.
Let’s take Wisconsin. The Right Wing poured an estimated $16 million into the state in various ways, but mostly by television commercials designed to scare the shit out of the people. (This was Himmler’s idea. Frighten the people enough and they’ll do anything you want them to do.) This, in a heretofore relatively moderate Republican state, was enough to bring in Walker and his veto-proof Republican Senate and House.
So what did Walker do? Let’s look at one example of why, while corporations and wealthy taxpayers got a $17.6 million tax cut, Wisconsin voters began to march on the Capitol. Walker cut the state contribution to pensions. The average worker making $40,000 per year (and many make more and so would pay more) would now have to pay $2,200 more in pension contribution and $1,800 more in health care contribution. That’s a pay cut and benefit cut of a net $4,000 a year, while the rich are not only not taxed more…but this Neocon-Nazi governor gives them another tax break.
Maybe Walker is not a Neocon-Nazi. Maybe he is just a man who likes to keep a state in balance, wants to simply let jobs happen on their own somehow, feels unions pervert personnel practices, really believes that the Rich will create jobs (although they haven’t done so since 2008!) and that he really is a nice guy rather than an ogre, which everyone except his followers, including many Republicans in Wisconsin now feel certain he is.
So let’s leave Wisconsin and go to Ohio. What evidence is there that the same process that was followed, almost line-for-line in the national Republican plan as Walker laid it out, is anything other than an honest attempt to solve budget problems?
Lets just take one little item. Something called the ALEC. That stands for American Legislative Exchange Council. It is simple a name fabricated to conceal the motives of a bunch of rich white guys. Kasich is a long-time and prominent member.
Here is what ALEC members want.
Privatize prisons. If we make prisons a private enterprise, what incentive is there to release prisoners?
Repeal the estate tax. The fact is that there are only about 1800 families that are affected by the inheritance tax, but they are among the wealthiest. People like the senior Rockefellers, the Gates family , Warren Buffett and others say that they do not want their inheritance taxes eliminated. A study by the New York Times showed that even at current rates or the highest rates in the last decade, the average family pays only about a net 15% on inheritances after deductions. But ALEC members want it repealed.
They want tort reform. What that means is this. If someone pollutes your land, they would say that you don’t need government regulations. Just sue. But then they say they want tort reform. That means you can only get a certain amount say $100,000 no matter what happens to you.
Finally, they want to do away with all government. ALEC members literally…literally…want a new Constitution to give states the authority to make up their own rules and ignore federal rules. The idea is to have many small states, which as you can see from the recent election, are easier to manipulate by big, rich corporations. You see it now in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, New Jersey, Maine and other states, including some projects in Massachusetts.
ALEC is a national organization bent on eliminating the Federal government. Do you know who didn’t like Federal government? Slave holders. State’s rights are all about the rights of slaveholders to own slaves. Today, states’ rights are all about avoiding paying taxes, about selling state governmental agencies off to private firms. It doesn’t matter how much it costs the average citizen or if the private agencies work out. The point is that privatization is the first thing you look at if you want to cut back government.
States rights is about large corporations being able to make a fortune on government monopolies owned by private individuals. You must use their service. If you don’t like it you complain to government and they say …it’s not us, it’s them. But you find that you can’t sue them because your being unable to sue them was a condition of their taking over the utility.
It is happening right now. The poster boy on the front cover of their magazine is Mitch Daniels of Indiana. Who is Mitch Daniels? He was the budget director under Bush II who said that the government should sell off everything to pay its bills. Why were they having a problem paying their bills? Because Repubicans like Daniels encouraged the Reagan administration to drop the top marginal tax rate from 74% to 28%.
If your income dropped from $74,000 to $28,000 overnight, how do you think you would fare? That’s exactly what has happened to our government for the last 30 years under Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. They put $13 trillion in the deficit column, but all the rich got much, much, much richer.
The top 1% of individuals with income and wealth now owns more than the bottom 50% and those numbers do not do the situation justice. Corporate executives make twenty, thirty, even seventy or eighty million a year, while sending average jobs overseas. CEOs today make 300-400 times the average workers wage. While you are struggling to pay for your health care, or searching to even find health care insurance, the CEOs of the health insurance companies are making an average of $14 million dollars a year, every year.
As soon as Daniels became governor, he sold off the Indiana toll road. He cut salaries and ended collective bargaining. The people of Indiana went along with it. They are very conservative and not particularly friendly. Indianapolis was the headquarters of the KKK for many, many years. People apparently think that it will always be the other guy whose ox is gored.
The fact is simply this: all our oxes are being gored. The Neocon-Nazis are slowly but surely taking over. We have talked about the effectiveness of the Right Wing media propaganda machine. It cranks out lies on over 90% of the talk radio stations in the country every day. These Right Wing radio hosts are leading the way for the television ads of the Kochs, and the Scaifes and the corporations, like EXXON and BP.
It is time we began a serious blowback to this kind of ruthless political philosophy. It is time for the return of Liberal ideas and a Populist Party.
