Will all your money
Buy you forgiveness?
Keep you from sickness?
Or keep you from cold?
Will all your money
Keep you from sadness,
Or keep you from madness
When you’re down in the hole?
—Mick Jagger, “Down in the Hole”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
Roosevelt’s nightmare has become American reality, we are now clearly a fascist state by his definition. The word fascism has been replaced by the propaganda term “corporate capitalism.”
The USA has its mainstream media entirely controlled by private power. Electronic media, where most Americans get their news, is nearly all corporate-controlled, including PBS/NPR, which take millions of dollars from corporations and acquiesce to their viewpoint. It is extremely deceptive for them to pretend to represent the public interest.
Media owners, board members and advertisers are tied to polluting, defense cheating and bankstering, the same fascists who finance the American elections for control. With control of the government and mass media, the ruling plutocrats do as they please.
Many citizens are catching on to some degree, but they miss a critical point. The billionaires who control the USA are not necessarily American. Through their investments in “American” corporations which rent our elections, foreign billionaires have far more influence over the US government than do the American people.
What the global wealthy use the USA for, primarily, is their private piggy bank. Most of the treasury is used for war and intimidation in their interest, and to protect the global “free” trade they have established against the public interest. They profit from the weapons sold to our government and other governments boosting wars around the globe at the expense of 99% of the world’s population.
Jobs have been moved to the third world in search of slave labor, prison labor and child labor, with which to undermine the workers of the world. This means that goods must be shipped vast distances at great expense to the environment and climate change, but the billionaires don’t care about anything but profit, a primary reason they are billionaires.
The plutocrats hire people to handle their money and manage the governments for them. These regents are tasked to make their masters wealthier at any cost to the public interest.
Those who manage the corporate news know what to say, and those who manage the corporate government know what to do without being coaxed. If they were the kind of people who had to be lectured to keep them in line, they wouldn’t be hired in the first place.
President Obama got more money from banksters in 2008 than any candidate for office in history, and immediately bailed out Wall Street after taking office. He took “defense” contractor money and immediately increased the war in Afghanistan by 30,000 troops after campaigning as a peace candidate. He has served his masters well, as do they all.
Last month, Abby Martin began her new series The Empire Files, urging us all to fight against the empire and bring it down. The empire does not serve the American people, it subjugates them, just as it does people in other nations.
Chris Hedges wrote a magnificent piece, concluding, “There can be no rational debate about empire with many desperate Americans who have ingested this as their creed. The distortion of neoliberalism has left them little else. Here lies the virus of fascism, wrapped in the American flag . . .”
The “virus of fascism” has plagued us with many fascist characteristics, none clearer than the military state, as Hedges details. We must get rid of it if we are to gain any semblance of democracy.
Many have recognized this over decades which have left us increasingly militarized, both domestically and globally. When one is confronted with the task of dismantling this behemoth, one wonders where to begin.
I would suggest we begin by uniting in an effort to dismantle the overseas military bases. The domestic ones have a large constituency, many of them providing millions of dollars to local economies.
The Pentagon won’t say how many bases it has abroad, but, depending on how one defines a military base, there are from 800 to a thousand, more foreign bases than have all other nations on earth. Their function is to protect global trade, which hurts far more citizens than it helps, and intimidate those who interfere with laissez faire capitalism, or fascism as President Roosevelt defined it.
We must get information out around the corporate media to persuade our fellow citizens to oppose empire, showing that it does not serve the American people, but the international investors and international corporations, as an instrument of fascism.
We will be attacked for suggesting that “defense,” as it is euphemistically called, should be in any way cut. Since we fight our wars abroad, it should not be called defense, but the propaganda seems to work, which is why the National Security Act of 1947 changed the name from “War Department.” People don’t like war, but they like defense. It is all propaganda, all the time in the Land of the Free.
We will be told that the sky will fall if our empire should desist from harassing the nasties of the globe. But Russia seems to do fine trading, even with the economic attacks by the USA and its client states, despite the fact that it has only one foreign military base, in Syria. If Russia can do it, so can we.
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of An Attack on the National Security State, about peace activists in prison. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com.
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How we may begin to dismantle fascism in America
Posted on October 6, 2015 by Jack Balkwill
President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
Roosevelt’s nightmare has become American reality, we are now clearly a fascist state by his definition. The word fascism has been replaced by the propaganda term “corporate capitalism.”
The USA has its mainstream media entirely controlled by private power. Electronic media, where most Americans get their news, is nearly all corporate-controlled, including PBS/NPR, which take millions of dollars from corporations and acquiesce to their viewpoint. It is extremely deceptive for them to pretend to represent the public interest.
Media owners, board members and advertisers are tied to polluting, defense cheating and bankstering, the same fascists who finance the American elections for control. With control of the government and mass media, the ruling plutocrats do as they please.
Many citizens are catching on to some degree, but they miss a critical point. The billionaires who control the USA are not necessarily American. Through their investments in “American” corporations which rent our elections, foreign billionaires have far more influence over the US government than do the American people.
What the global wealthy use the USA for, primarily, is their private piggy bank. Most of the treasury is used for war and intimidation in their interest, and to protect the global “free” trade they have established against the public interest. They profit from the weapons sold to our government and other governments boosting wars around the globe at the expense of 99% of the world’s population.
Jobs have been moved to the third world in search of slave labor, prison labor and child labor, with which to undermine the workers of the world. This means that goods must be shipped vast distances at great expense to the environment and climate change, but the billionaires don’t care about anything but profit, a primary reason they are billionaires.
The plutocrats hire people to handle their money and manage the governments for them. These regents are tasked to make their masters wealthier at any cost to the public interest.
Those who manage the corporate news know what to say, and those who manage the corporate government know what to do without being coaxed. If they were the kind of people who had to be lectured to keep them in line, they wouldn’t be hired in the first place.
President Obama got more money from banksters in 2008 than any candidate for office in history, and immediately bailed out Wall Street after taking office. He took “defense” contractor money and immediately increased the war in Afghanistan by 30,000 troops after campaigning as a peace candidate. He has served his masters well, as do they all.
Last month, Abby Martin began her new series The Empire Files, urging us all to fight against the empire and bring it down. The empire does not serve the American people, it subjugates them, just as it does people in other nations.
Chris Hedges wrote a magnificent piece, concluding, “There can be no rational debate about empire with many desperate Americans who have ingested this as their creed. The distortion of neoliberalism has left them little else. Here lies the virus of fascism, wrapped in the American flag . . .”
The “virus of fascism” has plagued us with many fascist characteristics, none clearer than the military state, as Hedges details. We must get rid of it if we are to gain any semblance of democracy.
Many have recognized this over decades which have left us increasingly militarized, both domestically and globally. When one is confronted with the task of dismantling this behemoth, one wonders where to begin.
I would suggest we begin by uniting in an effort to dismantle the overseas military bases. The domestic ones have a large constituency, many of them providing millions of dollars to local economies.
The Pentagon won’t say how many bases it has abroad, but, depending on how one defines a military base, there are from 800 to a thousand, more foreign bases than have all other nations on earth. Their function is to protect global trade, which hurts far more citizens than it helps, and intimidate those who interfere with laissez faire capitalism, or fascism as President Roosevelt defined it.
We must get information out around the corporate media to persuade our fellow citizens to oppose empire, showing that it does not serve the American people, but the international investors and international corporations, as an instrument of fascism.
We will be attacked for suggesting that “defense,” as it is euphemistically called, should be in any way cut. Since we fight our wars abroad, it should not be called defense, but the propaganda seems to work, which is why the National Security Act of 1947 changed the name from “War Department.” People don’t like war, but they like defense. It is all propaganda, all the time in the Land of the Free.
We will be told that the sky will fall if our empire should desist from harassing the nasties of the globe. But Russia seems to do fine trading, even with the economic attacks by the USA and its client states, despite the fact that it has only one foreign military base, in Syria. If Russia can do it, so can we.
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of An Attack on the National Security State, about peace activists in prison. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com.