Tag: fascism

Joseph Stiglitz: ‘Trump Has Fascist Tendencies’

Nobel prize-winning economist on the threat from the U.S. president, fairer globalization—and whether Bernie Sanders would have won.

chasdarwinLeave a comment
Photo Credit: Michael Vadon / Flickr

Source: The Guardian via AlterNet

Author:  Larry Elliott / The Guardian

Emphasis Mine

Harry Truman once demanded to be given one-handed economists because he became so frustrated with his advisers meeting every demand for answers with “on the one hand, on the other hand”.

Truman would have liked Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize-winning economist who worked for a later Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and who does not mince words when talking about the current incumbent of the White House, Donald Trump.

Stiglitz, in London to publicise his new book, says that for the past six or seven years he has been growing increasingly disturbed by America’s growing inequality and the simmering anger it has caused.

“I began to say ‘if we didn’t fix this problem we are going to have a political problem’ and historically a Trump figure, a fascist kind of figure arises.”

Asked whether he really thinks Trump is a fascist, Stiglitz says: “I certainly think he has those tendencies. He is restrained by our institutions and every day those institutions work we feel relieved. We don’t know what the bounds are and we don’t know how far he would push those bounds.

“A couple of things are most disturbing – the attack on the press and the attack on the foundations of knowledge which goes beyond the press.

“We have never had a president who day after day lies and is unaffected by it. Normally everybody you deal with is tethered by a sense of responsibility and truth, but not him.

“I think the other thing you have seen with some of these fascist leaders is using ‘us versus them’ as a way of dividing society.” Stiglitz says Trump is using racism and misogyny to divide America. “To me it is deeply, deeply disturbing.”

Stiglitz had his differences with Clinton, for whom he worked as chairman of the council of economic advisers, and Barack Obama, criticising both for not doing enough to ensure that the fruits of growth were more evenly shared.

But he sees Trump as not just misguided but positively dangerous – a man who has difficulty telling the truth, whose word is not to be trusted and who might even respond to being thwarted in his plans by pushing the nuclear button.

He gives as an example the president’s determination to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), which created a free trade zone between the US, Canada and Mexico a quarter of a century ago.

Trump thinks the agreement has been bad for America but is running into strong opposition from big business, which has outsourced production to exploit cheaper labour costs south of the Rio Grande.

“What I worry about is that when Trump is confronted with the reality that he can’t do on Nafta what he wants to do he will strike out like a little kid and do something dangerous – like putting his finger on a button he shouldn’t be putting his finger on.

Would Trump really put his finger on the nuclear button because he was thwarted over Nafta? “We don’t know. There is a discussion in Congress to restrain his ability to put his finger on that button.”

Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race has encouraged Stiglitz to update and expand his 2002 book, Globalisation and its Discontents. The original book, written in the wake of the violent protests on the streets of Seattle, Prague, Washington DC and Genoa, assumed that globalisation’s discontents were in poor countries. The new book charts how the unhappiness has spread from the developing to developed world and led to Trump, Brexit and growing support for extreme parties in continental Europe.

Stiglitz attributes Trump’s election to globalisation, rising inequality and the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis.

“This is a global phenomenon. Part of it is growing inequality and the way people have come to understand that inequality. They see the world doing better and they see that they are not getting better off. They don’t want to say it’s because of what I’ve done, it’s because of what’s happened to me. Something that Trump said captured what a lot of people think: the system is rigged.

“Part of this is a legitimate anger relating to the crisis of 2008 and how we handled it. We saved the banks, we saved the bankers and we saved the shareholders; we didn’t do much for homeowners and the workers who were losing their jobs.”

Stiglitz says he told Obama before he became president that the focus should be on helping ordinary Americans. “But the dominant influence were the bankers in Wall Street.”

The rules of the American economy were rewritten in the 1980s in ways that weakened labour and watered down anti-trust and other competition laws, Stiglitz says. He believes discontent would have surfaced even without the 2008 crisis. “But I think it worsened it, crystalised it.”

He added: “The crisis of 2008 made things much much worse. Millions of Americans lost their homes and the way things were managed was grossly unfair.”

The reason neither developed nor developing countries are happy with globalisation, Stiglitz says, is that trade agreements were written by and for corporations and against ordinary workers in both places.

Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1943. Then a booming steel town, Gary has become one of the places in the midwest that has come to symbolise America’s rust belt decay. Stiglitz says he understands the anger that turned Indiana into Trumpland because for the poorest Americans wages adjusted for inflation had not increased for six decades.

The US economy has been growing at a reasonable pace in the year since the presidential election, with unemployment falling, consumer confidence strong and the stock market rising. So does Stiglitz thinks Trump’s economic strategy will work?

“There is no way … that it will raise living standards. The reality is that the standard of living will go down if he succeeds in doing any significant part of what he is proposing.

“He is proposing deglobalisation, breaking up the efficient supply chains that have been created and raising costs. If manufacturing jobs do come back to the US they will be done by robots in hi-tech parts of the country rather than the rust belt states.”

The updated Globalisation and its Discontents sketches out three possible ways forward: doubling down on the current model of globalisation, the new protectionism, or a fairer globalisation. More of the status quo is not politically feasible, he says, and wouldn’t work anyway, while Trump is the manifestation of the new protectionism. “It means going back into yourself, ignoring all the advantages of trade such as specialisation. It’s dishonest populism. We have to make globalisation work, stop more than 100% of the gains going to the people at the top.”

But is fairer globalisation any more politically feasible given the likely push back from the 1%. “There is going to be resistance. But we are democracies.

“I don’t think we can have democracies that work where most of the people are not benefiting economically, where most of the people are worried about their job security. Society can’t function without shared prosperity.”

Stiglitz says Bernie Sanders would have beaten Trump. “I see the election of 2016 as an election of protest. Bernie represented a return to the old values: a middle-class lifestyle, a home, a secure retirement, education for your children, healthcare. Jeremy Corbyn is saying the same thing in the UK.”

Instead America is led by a man Stiglitz says should not be in the White House. “He is not fit to be president. He does not have an understanding of the issues, the political process. He is used to making one-time deals. You can cheat your contractors when you buy a real estate property and fix it up. Reputation doesn’t matter. For the president of the United States reputation does matter. The reputation of the United States does matter. We are dealing with countries all over the world. They want to know if your word is good. Trump’s word is not good.”

Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s economics editor and has been with the paper since 1988.

 

 

 

 

 

The Revolt of the Banana Repubicans

The travesty that unfolded in Cleveland…

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: Tablet Magazine

Author: James Kirchick

Emphasis Mine

Sitting with me in the van to the airport on my way to Cleveland was a German family. Our driver turned the radio on, and a top-of-the-hour news update rehearsed the familiar litany of American woe. First, an excerpt from a somber speech by President Barack Obama discussing the latest episode of gun violence, this time in Baton Rouge. Next, a reply from Donald Trump, days away from receiving the presidential nomination of the Republican Party, who attacked the president on Twitter for turning the country into “a divided crime scene.” Rounding it out was an item about the Cleveland Police Department’s worry that demonstrators outside the Republican National Convention would take advantage of Ohio’s concealed carry law by arming themselves to the teeth. Listening in the back seat of the van to this recitation of carnage and absurdism, my thoughts drifted immediately to a friend of mine, the Washington correspondent for a major German daily, with whom I had been emailing earlier in the week. He could make a name for himself as a sort of reverse William Shirer, I would tell him, only half-jokingly, chronicling for a German readership the rise of fascism in America.

July 19, 2016, should go down in history as the date the Republican Party deservedly died—“political Jonestown” as the novelist Thomas Mallon called it earlier this month. For that was when the GOP finally nominated Donald Trump for president, officially sanctioning the idea that the fate of the free world ought to be entrusted to an aspiring authoritarian reality television show host. Mallon is an ingenious novelist of historical American political fiction, but I doubt even he could have dreamed up a scenario so bleak as the travesty that unfolded in Cleveland last week, one that, as an agitated observer of the Trump phenomenon, I felt compelled to witness from the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena, or “the Q,” as it is affectionately called.

My sojourn into the madness of Trumplandia began with a Monday noon foray to the “America First Unity Rally” held on the banks of the Cuyahoga River just a few blocks from the convention center. Organized by the conspiracy theory-spouting radio host Alex Jones (whose usual fare consists of claims like juice boxes are part of a government plot to make children gay or that the “chemtrails” from jetliners are elements of a giant mind-control experiment) and Nixon-era political operative Roger Stone, the event had the feel of a Guns ‘n Roses concert put on by the John Birch Society. Over the course of several hours, a motley cast of characters addressed a crowd of about 200 people, all united by grievance toward “the establishment,” a pathological hatred of Hillary Clinton, and an abiding belief that Donald Trump will single-handedly fix America’s problems. The mother of a man murdered by an illegal immigrant shared the heartbreaking story of her son’s death. A black Tea Party activist and perpetual congressional candidate from Maryland reassured the audience that Trump (“an outsider like myself”) is no racist, and closed out his pep talk with a put-down of the “disgusting, disgusted, and busted” presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Musical interludes were provided by a low-rent, right-wing Stevie Nicks lookalike and a 16-year-old Russian immigrant who sang her own song titled “Political Correctness.” John McCain’s Tea Party challenger in the Arizona Republican senate primary railed against a “global tuxedo club” of elitist overlords and declared herself ready and able to “mix the mortar to fix the border.” Offering muscle for the afternoon was “Bikers for Trump,” the leader of which boasted that “we’ve got guys all over the city” to “do whatever’s necessary” to keep the peace.

There exists a vast academic literature on the sociological composition of American voters (at the demonstration, graduate students from a nearby university passed out questionnaires to attendees as part of a research project on the attitudes and backgrounds of Trump supporters). Reams of articles have been written on Trump’s appeal to downscale whites, who appeared to compose the majority of people at the riverside rally (far from all Trump supporters are working class, however; the median income of his voters is $72,000). But there are elements of a candidate’s support base that are unmeasurable, common characteristics that no sociological study or series of polls can reveal. This is particularly true of Trump’s more high-profile backers and official surrogates. Indeed, the degree to which supporters of Donald Trump reflect the candidate in temperament, style, and even diction, across subgroups like gender, race, sexual orientation and class, is remarkable.

The Donald Trump for President campaign has become a fly-trap for seemingly every American dimestore huckster, grifter, scrounger, has-been and wannabe. The roll call of D-list celebrities and politicians who spoke at the convention, along with the raft of lesser-known opportunists and frauds who decided to become Trumpkins so as to get on TV, resembles a list of fictional characters from the collected works of Billy Joel. Scott Baio, Antonio Sabato Jr., and Robert Davi embody the distinctly bridge and tunnel, alpha-male thuggishness of Trump’s “celebrity” support. Scott Brown, whose political career crashed and burned years ago after a brief stint as senator from Massachusetts, enlisted himself with Trump in hopes of escaping life as a hawker of diet supplements, ironically the perfect preparation for a snake-oil dispensing presidential campaign. (Brown, unsurprisingly, brought along to the convention his aging local news anchor wife and daughter, a former contestant on American Idol and budding starlet.)

The porcine duo of Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris, both of whom waddled past me on the convention’s first day, are physical manifestations of what the Republican Party has become under Trump, whose fleshy jowls at times render him indistinguishable from a bullfrog. Unlike the fit and trim House Speaker Paul Ryan, a visibly reluctant Trump supporter who clearly would have rather spent the entirety of last week in a dentist’s chair, Gingrich and Morris are engorged, mercenary, and utterly lacking in self-control, as willing to stick whole plates of food down their gullets or reach for the nearest “beautiful piece of ass” (or prostitute’s toe) as they are ready to adapt their principles to the moment. Listen to Eric Trump talk about his father’s future cabinet and you get the gist of the intellectually hollow, wise-guy chutzpah that exists in place of a governing ideology or worldview for those who’ve chosen to degrade themselves by supporting Trump. “If we’re going to have the biggest deals in the world, which are trade deals, why not have the best guys negotiate this?” he told The Hill, as if taking a sip from his tall boy on the LIRR. “Why not have the Carl Icahns or the top guys of Wall Street? It’s why they’re worth millions and billions of dollars. It’s because they’re tough and they’re shrewd.”

Reflecting the outsider status of its sponsors Jones and Stone, the “America First” rally initially seemed to be a gathering of people too wacky to speak from the convention stage. But it became readily apparent Monday evening that the themes of this “shadow” convention would, in fact, be parroted by the ostensibly more respectable delegates inside the Q.

The night began with a benediction from Brooklyn priest Kieran Harrington, who, head bowed, made reference to “deliberations,” declared “we stand before you, contrite,” and asked the Lord to “bless those who endured torture,” sentiments completely at odds with those expressed by the man about to receive the crowd’s enthusiastic nomination for president. Following that uncharacteristically humble opening, the message of the evening proceeded as follows: Mexicans and Muslims want to rape and kill you. Relatives of people murdered by illegal immigrants joined people like Pat Smith, mother of a foreign service officer killed in the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack, in a festival of fear and loathing.

It would have been one thing if this shameless retailing of victimhood (something conservatives usually blame liberals for doing) was limited to tales of self-pity. What made it truly terrifying were the calls for blood. At the “America First” rally earlier in the day, I had seen dozens of people sporting “Hillary for Prison” T-shirts, what I took at the time to be nothing more than a token of Roger Stone’s virulent mischief. Inside the hall, I was appalled to hear, repeatedly and on every night of the convention, delegates cry “Lock her up!” whenever Clinton’s name was mentioned. It was an exhortation issued directly from the stage. Darryl Glenn, a senate candidate in Colorado, declared that Clinton should be outfitted in a “bright orange jumpsuit.” Pat Smith, who, in the exploitation of her grief the right has fashioned into its own Cindy Sheehan, insisted that the former secretary of state “deserves to be in stripes.”

The degeneration of the Republicans into banana Republicans reached its apotheosis on Wednesday evening, when Chris Christie, apparently worried that his reputation as a fat creep hadn’t yet taken hold within the minds of a majority of Americans, led the crowd in a call-and-response show trial-cum-lynch mob. Going through a laundry list of Hillary Clinton’s alleged crimes, the former federal prosecutor ended each accusation with the question, “Guilty or not guilty?” Most of Christie’s charge sheet consisted of political initiatives like the Russian reset and opening to Cuba, which, whatever their wisdom (and I, for what it’s worth, think they lacked it), had not the faintest whiff of criminality. But none of this mattered to the Jersey boy play-acting as Red Army hanging judge.

On the surface, the proliferation of anti-Hillary revenge fantasies smelled like the work of Paul Manafort. Trump’s roguishly handsome campaign manager spent years working as a consultant to former strongman president of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych, who in addition to stealing vast amounts of money from the public purse, was also famous for locking up his major political opponent. If Clinton weren’t imprisoned under a Trump regime, I cynically speculated, she might become the victim of dioxin poisoning, the fate that mysteriously befell Yanukovych’s other main rival.

But the single-minded obsession with throwing Clinton behind bars is an organic malady rather than a Manafortian import. It’s but one of many fixations that used to exist on the right-wing fringe but which the GOP decided to place front and center as part of its policy agenda. Last week’s convention saw an entire alternative media and political ecosystem (a potpourri of websites, podcasts, radio talk shows, and personalities like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter) take control of the party apparatus and dictate its own version of reality. Trump’s followers inhabit an America in which “SJWs” (social justice warriors) make life intolerable for white men, where unsuspecting individuals are forced to watch a feminist Ghostbustersmovie like Alex was subjected to audiovisual torture in A Clockwork Orange, and everyone must dodge a proliferating number of Mexican and Muslim rapists and murderers. When Uday and Qusay Trump ceremoniously announced the votes of the New York delegation, and the light board in the rafters flashed “OVER THE TOP!” it was more than just a literal description of Trump’s campaign.

***

With the ritualized incantations of approved slogans, resolute messaging from the dais and deification of the candidate, political party conventions are the closest America comes to the one-party state. In this respect, the Donald did not disappoint. A biographical video that was more “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” than “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” praised him for “dominating” the world of real estate and, now, politics. As an image flashed by of Trump in a ridiculously oversized top coat waving his hands at a crew of actors posing as hard-hatted construction workers, I was reminded of the parody website “Kim Jong Un Looking at Things,” which features photos of the North Korean dictator hectoring generals and inspecting random objects like an airport lounge table or processed food machinery.

With Trump, however, the authoritarian milieu extends beyond the mere aesthetic. It’s not unusual for a presidential candidate to showcase his attractive family. But never before has the nominee’s progeny played a more crucial role in a campaign, with the promise that they will play a crucial role in the future administration—the sort of dynastic nepotism one expects in a Third World country. I’ve lost track of the number of Trump supporters who cite his children as a chief reason for their support of the man; Maureen Reagan, Meghan McCain, and the five Romney boys never inspired such fawning.

Supporting Trump is an inherently masochistic act, and not only because one must surrender his conscience to do so. It is a form of intellectual and moral surrender. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” Trump declared, in the most chilling and terrifying line of his acceptance speech. Trump’s tacit admission of corruption was paired with the implication that, if elected, he would be corrupt on behalf of the American people. This, I believe, is why the never-ending stream of stories attesting to his gross deceit and venality has done, and will do, nothing to dissuade his hypnotized supporters. Buddy Cianci, the tough guy former mayor of Providence, had a similar appeal, earning high approval ratings not in spite of, but because of his corruption: Citizens thought he was greasing the wheels to “get things done” for their city. A pair of political scientists even wrote a research paper on the phenomenon, titled “Popular Rogues.” But even if Trump could boast Cianci’s record of achievement in public office, which he can’t, his sins are far greater than those of the racketeering ex-mayor of the Renaissance City.

Overpromising is nothing new in politics, but Trump takes it to another level. He is a political alchemist whose followers longingly see him as a Rumpelstiltskin ready to spin their hay into gold. “Come January 17, all things will be possible again,” promised the alluring and attractive Ivanka Trump, sounding (and looking) nothing so much like one of those models in a television ad for a phone-sex line (and curiously choosing the date three days before the inauguration as that of America’s salvation). When Trump took the stage, his promises repeatedly brought the audience to its feet. “The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” he declared. “Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”

“I am going to turn our bad trade agreements into great ones.”

“I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences.”

“I’m going to make our country rich again.”

I, I, I. But nothing about how.

Hours before Trump’s address, Manafort tried to explain how his candidate would appeal to women. “They can’t afford their lives,” he told MSNBC. “Their husbands can’t afford paying the family bills.” A similar explanation has been offered for President Vladimir Putin’s popularity with Russian women, many of whom lack a father figure or reliable husbands, having lost them to the bottle. Trump’s repeated avowals of being a singularly transformative figure (“I alone”) make his predecessor’s prediction of lowered sea levels upon his own election look tame by comparison. A party that spent the past eight years lambasting Obama’s expansion of executive powers lost all credibility as I stood among a sea of people imploring an aspiring authoritarian to “Keep us safe!”

There is an unspoken social contract in democratic politics: Candidates should not overtly appeal to citizens’ basest instincts. As citizens in the world’s oldest constitutional democracy, we place a great deal of faith in the judgment of individuals, trusting that they would never willingly elect a tyrant to power. And thankfully, there are multiple, mediating institutions in our system of republican government to prevent a single individual or movement from assuming absolute control. But what if a totally unscrupulous demagogue—one with undeniable charisma and mass media appeal—comes along and decides that the unspoken social contract, like every other rule he has ever encountered, does not apply to him?

That is what Donald Trump has done: He has broken the social contract between the American people and their political leaders by banking on the assumption that unvarnished nativism, bigotry, and ignorance will win him the presidency.

Even worse, Trump has been rewarded by purportedly responsible and reasonable people, people whom I once respected and had to watch barking like seals as this madman and would-be tyrant brought them up to their feet again and again with his empty promises of salvific national recovery. When the delegates cheered him, did they think about the time he ridiculed John McCain for being “captured?” For me, like many others, that was the first moment I thought, “it’s over” for Trump. How many insults, stunning professions of ignorance, and outrageous revelations ago was that “gaffe”?

As they rose to hoot and holler, did the Republicans in Cleveland remember, even in the distant recesses of their minds, when he mocked a physically handicapped reporter? Did they recall the many loathsome remarks he made about women, or the praise he offered the Chinese communists for running their tanks over people in Tiananmen Square, or the encouragement he bestowed—just a day prior—upon Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruthless purge? The morning after accepting their nomination, when Trump—citing a supermarket tabloid—once again speculated that Ted Cruz’s father had been involved in the JFK assassination, did they reflect upon what enabling a plainly demented individual says about their patriotism? Did these latter-day Pontius Pilates, many of whom pridefully advertise themselves as adherents of Judeo-Christian faith, pause a moment to consider what their ancient texts say about the weak and the strong, the rich and the poor, about those who lust for power at the expense of everything else? I hope they did, and that they felt at least a pang of guilt at their participation in this moral obscenity masking itself as an exercise in American democracy.

*** You can help support Tablet’s unique brand of Jewish journalism. Click here to donate today. 

James Kirchick, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Initiative, is a columnist at Tablet. He is a former writer at large for Radio Free Europe based in Prague and a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow based in Berlin. His Twitter feed is @jkirchick.

See:http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/208990/revolt-of-the-banana-republicans?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=f8847ae5a9-July_25_20167_25_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-f8847ae5a9-206691737

Donald Trump’s Caesar Moment

Detached from history and fueled by fear, his convention speech was utterly unlike anything we’ve heard in American politics.

chasdarwinLeave a comment
I am king
I accept

Source: Portside

Author: Jeff Greenfield, Politico

Emphasis Mine

It was a speech perfectly suited to the nominee. It was a speech utterly unconnected to anything we have ever heard from any previous nominee. It was, then, exactly what we should have expected from this most unexpected of candidates.

Most American presidential nominees—indeed, most convention speakers—pay homage to outsized figures of the nation’s past, even some from the other side of the spectrum. House Speaker Paul Ryan, as did countless others in Cleveland, paid homage to Ronald Reagan. Vice Presidential nominee Mike Pence told the assembled Republicans that “the heroes of my youth were President John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Ronald Reagan himself, back in 1980, quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt. In past conventions, the Founding Fathers were invoked, or inspirational party leaders of the past, or some link to the heritage of party or country.

And Donald Trump? In his speech, there was no thread of any kind linking him to past American greats, no sense that he is following any tradition. Indeed, in one of the best-received lines of the speech, he told us, of our “rigged” system: “I alone can fix it.” Fix it with his own party’s leadership in Congress, or with an aroused populace? No. “I alone can fix it.”

In so many other ways, Trump presented himself as a man alone, imbued with the power to do what no other person or institution can do. Consider how he described his visits to “the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals. These are the forgotten men and women of our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice.

“I am your voice.”

In his speech, Trump defined himself as a bedrock figure in American culture: the figure who faces danger alone, who follows his own code of conduct.

In this declaration—repeated at the end of the speech—Trump defined himself as a bedrock figure in American culture: the figure who faces danger alone, who follows his own code of conduct. He is Gary Cooper, standing alone against the Miller Gang in Hadleyville. To be more precise, and more contemporary, he is the man who uses his great wealth to protect the powerless from evil: He’s Bruce Wayne as Batman, Tony Stark as Ironman.

In this persona, there is no room for a note of good humor or the kind of self-deprecation we’ve seen in other nominees. Mike Pence noted, in introducing himself to the crowd, that Trump “is a man known for having a large personality, a colorful style, and lots of charisma. I think he was just looking for some balance on the ticket.” Bill Clinton in 1992 mocked his own disastrous, wandering 1988 nominating speech by saying he’d run for President, “to finish the speech I began four years ago.”

Nor is there any room for a cautionary note about the limits of presidential power. John Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, for instance, ends by saying of his: “all this will not be finished in the 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1000 days, nor in the life of this Administration.”

What does Trump say?

“..the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end.”

(N.B.: crime is at a 40 year low.)

“On the economy, I will outline reforms to add millions of new jobs and trillions in new wealth that can be used to rebuild America.”

“On January 21st of 2017, the day after I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced.”

“I am going to bring our jobs back to Ohio and to America – and I am not going to let companies move to other countries, firing their employees along the way, without consequences.”

In this speech, we have finally seen the answer to the perplexing question of just what political philosophy Donald Trump embraces. It is Caesarism: belief in a leader of great strength who, by force of personality, imposes order on a land plagued by danger. If you want to know why Trump laid such emphasis on “law and order”—using Richard Nixon’s 1968 rhetoric in a country where violent crime is at a 40-year low—it is because nations fall under the sway of a Caesar only when they are engulfed by fear. And the subtext of this acceptance speech was: be afraid; be very afraid.

(N.B.: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – FDR inaugural speech March 1933.)

It is impossible to imagine anyone else giving an acceptance speech so disconnected from anything in the American political tradition. Whether voters see that departure as a cause for celebration or worry may help decide what happens in November.

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.
See:http://portside.org/2016-07-22/donald-trump%E2%80%99s-caesar-moment

Trump is a blessing. Together we should trample his candidacy and rebuild the Democratic Party

“He’s not moving a party to the left,” Volpe said, he’s “moving a generation to the left.”

chasdarwinLeave a comment
We The people
We The people

Source: Daily Kos

Author: Meteor Blades

Emphasis Mine

I voted for Bernie Sanders this morning in the California primary. Come November I will vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on the “political revolution.” On the contrary.

That revolution is not the blood-in-the-streets kind that some stubborn anti-Sanders critics claim is the only kind there is, but rather a non-violent upheaval, a transformation that frees our system of billionaire, white-supremacist governance from the bottom up. Non-violent but never passive. Peaceful but not non-confrontational.

Bernie Sanders will presumably continue to be an important part of that transformation. Nobody, not even Sanders, expected he would succeed as amazingly as he has. Yet he will arrive in Philadelphia with more delegates than any insurgent campaign in a very long time. His campaign’s list of backers contains the names of 2.4 million people who have contributed more than $200 million to his campaign. On social media, he has some 9 million supporters. That’s a potentially powerful base, especially if those on it who were not already politically engaged before the campaign can be persuaded to stay engaged.

But Sanders didn’t initiate the transformation. And it certainly will not end when his candidacy ends, either tonight or next Tuesday in D.C. or in Philadelphia after the formal vote on the nominee is taken at the Democratic Convention.

Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ activists, 350.org, the Fight for 15, nurses and teachers organizing, the Moral Monday Movement, and Moveon.org arejust a few of the many movement elements of that transformation—some successful, some not, all of them feeling their way along, smeared by media narratives, hindered by internal divisions, and tactically flawed—though their various critics, left and right, have different views on what the specific flaws actually are.

These movement organizations are a big part of transforming both attitudes and policies and thereby the breadth of the national conversation. Without them, Sanders’ candidacy would not have been possible. The campaign built on their hard work, drawing volunteers and staffers from their ranks.

Since the issues that brought forth those movement organizations have not been resolved, they and other newly formed organizations will continue to mobilize people to fight for systemic change. Because the Democratic Party has for so long been moving in a bad direction in several matters, the fight to transform it will continue as well.

But for the next five months, we Sanders, Clinton, O’Malley and none-of-the-above activists have a golden opportunity. Because Donald Trump’s sketchy candidacy can turbocharge our efforts to knock Republicans out of office and reform our own party. However, we’ll have to suppress some of our differences, chill our internecine partisanship, and bite our tongues temporarily to make it happen.

After 50 years of moving the Republican Party ever more rightward, ever more whiteward, the logical extreme has been reached. Donald Trump, carnival barker and snake oil salesman, the first major party candidate about which The New York Times felt the need to discuss the “f” word—fascism—will be the GOP nominee unless he decides he’s tired of the act he’s been performing for the past year and abandons the party at the convention door.

Fascism is not a word to be used lightly. In the 1960s, some on the left practically made a joke of the label, promiscuously attaching it to anybody or any policy they disagreed with. So I’ve always applied it with extreme caution. Nonetheless, while Trump may not mesh perfectly with definitions of fascism, there’s more than a whiff of the brownshirt in his public pronouncements. Those along with his relentless lying, misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and general know-nothingism make him a rich target for the kind of devastation Clinton and Elizabeth Warren have dished out recently. A full-bore crushing of his candidacy could inflict collateral damage on the GOP all the way down the ballot.

With wealthy donors saying they won’t support Trump, leading Republicans saying they won’t vote for him, and the candidate’s continual dissing of groups of people from which he might otherwise get at least a few votes, Trump faces an uphill battle against Clinton despite the high percentage of Americans who view her unfavorably.

With that in mind, supporters of Clinton and Sanders and O’Malley should join not merely in defeating but in demolishing Donald Trump’s candidacy and, in the process, damaging the Republican Party in Congress and the state legislatures by hanging the man’s contradictory statements around the necks of every candidate who says they support him. Defeating Republicans who might not otherwise be vulnerable this year can open doors for those desperately needed Democratic Party changes.

Bernie and those of us who support him can do a lot to help deliver this victory.

The senator should spend the months after the convention barnstorming in support of the best candidates, including the dozens that berniecrats.net has identified as being transformationally minded.

Each Sanders supporter should “adopt” a down-ballot candidate, a transformative person running for, say, a state legislative seat. We need to build that deep bench of experience in governing at the local and state levels anyway, and a presidential year like this one could mean significant gains in those arenas. These candidates should get our time, our money, or whatever support we can provide.

Sanders should continue to deliver his galvanizing, vital, and yes, angry message about the perniciousness of concentrated economic power. While Bernie has supporters in all age groups, the most avid are young people, including women and young people of color. If anyone can, he can persuade them not to make the mistake of staying home on election day even if that means many of them feel they must vote with a clothespin firmly in place.

All that, plus Sanders’ effort to get platform concessions passed or promised at the convention, is the inside strategy.

But as reformers have known from the time the Quakers went to Congress in 1790 seeking to end slavery, transformational change requires both an inside and an outside strategy.

Despite the “democratic socialist” label and an endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America—an organization (full disclosure) of which I have been a member since 1982—Sanders himself is not a socialist, as many observers here and elsewhere have noted for the past year. He is  a social democrat and not even a radical one. The ideas he has pressed forward, like universal health care, paid leave, free college tuition, and a more substantive social welfare system are only radical in the United States.

Those ideas and others have resonated particularly with young people. A Harvard Poll taken in April concluded that political attitudes of American youth have changed in just the past year. John Della Volpe, the polling director, says Sanders is a big reason. “He’s not moving a party to the left,” Volpe said, he’s “moving a generation to the left.”

Several organizations hope to capitalize on that leftward movement and do some moving of their own. Included among them are the Occupy Democrats, the Brand New Congress, the Working Families Party and the People’s Summit, an alliance of National Nurses United and People for Bernie,  which will gather in Chicago June 17 to 19.

On July 23, the day before the Democratic Convention begins, the People’s Convention will get underway in Philadelphia. The organization is developing and ratifying a People’s Platform that Sanders’ delegates will present to the Democratic National Convention. On the group’s website is laid out the intent:

The People’s Convention in Philadelphia [is] a grassroots attempt to reclaim our democracy by uniting behind a common policy framework, rather than a personality or party. Leading up to our first People’s Convention this summer, grassroots organizers from around the country will work together to formulate a People’s Platform: a unifying set of ideas, beliefs, and values that will help define the movement.

This platform will also serve as a critical mechanism to hold elected officials accountable; public representatives who pledge to uphold this platform, but fail to do so through their votes and other public behaviors, will no longer be eligible to seek endorsement or support from The People’s Revolution.

D.D. Guttenplan at The Nation wrote about the Brand New Congress:

Brand New Congress aims to give people a choice—in every district in the country. “Let’s run one campaign to replace Congress all at once (except those already on board) that whips up the same enthusiasm, volunteerism and money as Bernie’s presidential campaign,” says the group’s website. Zack Exley, who was the Wikimedia Foundation’s chief revenue officer before he started traveling the country to lead “Bernie Barnstorms” that trained thousands of volunteers for the Sanders campaign, is one of the group’s founders. They’re targeting the 2018 midterms because, Exley told me, “it takes a while to build the infrastructure to win elections—especially against entrenched incumbents.” The plan is to “recruit a full slate of candidates from people who are not politicians. People who never considered running for office. The majority will be women. A disproportionate number will be people of color. These will be people who are really good at what they do—nurses, engineers, teachers. People who have chances to sell out—but didn’t.”

That prompts lots of questions, beginning with how Brand New Congress can possibly win with progressive candidates in deep-red districts. Exley says the strategy is still up for discussion. And while the group may have set a hugely ambitious goal, I’ve met too many accomplished Sanders organizers in too many states who told me their only contact with campaign headquarters was “a visit from this guy Zack Exley” to dismiss the effort out of hand.

Ramon Ryan, a former organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees who’s been working for Sanders in Nashville, said the campaign taught him “how effective we can be organizing ourselves in our own communities.” Tennessee was another tough environment for Sanders supporters, and after the primary “a lot of us have been struggling to figure out where we fit in,” Ryan says. For him, Brand New Congress—which aims to build on the Sanders network, letting local campaigns run their own show while giving them access to a unified national campaign and national online fund-raising—offers an alternative to surrender or a return to marginality. “We’ve seen how the nature of presidential campaigns has changed from Dean to Obama to Sanders,” Ryan tells me. “We want to take this model and apply it to Congress. I love the simplicity of being able to use one campaign to effect so much change.”

One big argument among left-of-center activists for what seems like millennia has been whether inside or outside strategy is the better approach. To reiterate, they both are essential. Both working in tandem has been the way almost all transformational reforms have been achieved.

Working together now to trample Trump’s campaign and spread the pain to down-ballot Republicans doesn’t mean the struggle to bend the Democratic Party in a better direction is over. That fight is existential, so it will continue.

But calling a truce while we pulverize the Trump candidacy benefits all of us. A Trump victory will harm us all. And not just a little bit. We should deploy this gift Republicans have given us like the wrecking ball it is.

 

See:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/06/07/1534536/-Trump-is-a-blessing-Together-we-should-trample-his-candidacy-and-rebuild-the-Democratic-Party?detail=email&link_id=16&can_id=d57025b8908d671dcc8edc84e5855f8f&source=email-gracefirst-major-anti-trump-ad-is-out-and-it-is-devastating-2&email_referrer=gracefirst-major-anti-trump-ad-is-out-and-it-is-devastating-2&email_subject=grace-first-major-anti-trump-ad-is-out-and-it-is-devastating

Is Donald Trump Really a ‘Fascist’?

The Trump campaign doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Source: AlterNet

Author: Joe Conason

Emphasis Mine

(N.B.: I heard on Bill Maher one panelist state that Trump was striking a chord with many white middle class voters because illegal immigrants where “taking” their jobs.  Some may believe that message, but in fact, many jobs have been moved overseas, and many more have been eliminated by automation…)

Although he is still a clown, nobody laughs at Donald Trump anymore — which may be the real purpose of his candidacy, at least as far as he is concerned. The casino mogul is pleased to instill fear among Republican elites, as he dominates their presidential nominating contest — and forces them to face a hard question about the man who is exciting such belligerent enthusiasm among Republican voters.

Is Trump a real live fire-breathing fascist?

From Newsweek to Salon to the Daily Caller, commentators of various colorations have found ample reason to apply that often-discredited label to him. While these observers hesitate to lump Trump in with totalitarian dictatorships and historic crimes against humanity, they are clearly concerned over his strongman appeal, his populist rhetoric, and his rejection of GOP free-market orthodoxy.

Genuine conservatives aren’t wrong to fret, but they seem unwilling or unable to grasp the clearest evidence that Trump is channeling toxic currents from the past — namely, his appeals to racial bigotry, his truculent attitude toward other nations, and his extremist “solution” to illegal immigration.

Obvious clues to the noxious nature of Trumpism keep cropping up across the political landscape like poison mushrooms. In Boston’s “Southie” neighborhood, once headquarters of the openly racist anti-busing movement known as ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights), two white males severely beat an older Hispanic man. When arrested, one of the thugs told police, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”

Rather than deplore this ugly assault, Trump’s impulse was to praise the zeal of his supporters. “It would be a shame,” he said when first told of the beating, then added: “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”

At a big rally in Mobile, Alabama, Trump welcomed Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, R-Ala., the only prominent politician singled out for praise. Sessions is a dubious figure whose federal judicial nomination was once rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee over his record of racially inflammatory behavior and remarks — which included calling a white civil rights lawyer “a disgrace to his race” and opposing the Voting Rights Act. Today, he is the chief Senate opponent of legal immigration to the United States.

Opposition to legal as well as illegal immigration is a foundation of the white nationalist movement in the United States. So perhaps nobody should have been too surprised when a loud voice in the Mobile audience greeted Sessions’ arrival by screaming “White Power!”

Again, the reaction of the Trump campaign was telling. Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski responded that he wasn’t aware of the “white power” shouter. “I don’t know about the individual you’re talking about in Alabama,” he insisted. “I know there were 30-plus thousand people in that stadium. They were very receptive to the message of ‘making America great again’ because they want to be proud to be Americans again.”

Asked about the Boston beating, Lewandowski acknowledged that violence is “unacceptable,” continuing: “However, we should not be ashamed to be Americans. We should be proud of our country, proud of our heritage, and continue to be the greatest country in the world.” Like his boss, Lewandowski isn’t subtle. His dog-whistle about “heritage” and being “proud” was heard loud and clear by the white supremacist underworld, which is rallying behind Trump.

The troubling tone in Trump’s language can be detected when he talks about foreign policy, too. As David Cay Johnston recently reported, the draft-dodging billionaire boasts that he is the “most militaristic” candidate, and has blatantly advocated attacking other countries to “take” their oil. Imperial warmongering is a classic hallmark of fascism — indeed, it was military aggression by Nazi Germany that led to World War II.

Finally there is Trump’s “solution” to illegal immigration. He promises to deport an estimated 11-12 million people, a plan that would be ruinously expensive and grossly inhumane to even attempt. The only analogous projects on that scale were atrocities carried out by the Turks against Armenians and, later, by the Nazis against European Jews.

Imagine a country that seeks to round up millions of brown-skinned people by force, transforming itself into a police state, while mobs of vigilantes in militias scourge frightened families out of hiding. It is not hard to predict scenes of bloodshed and horror.

No Donald, that isn’t the way to “make America great again.” For most of us — the majority of citizens who have no use for Trump and Trumpism — that isn’t America at all.

 

Joe Conason is the editor of the National Memo and writes a column for creators.com

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/donald-trump-really-fascist?akid=13427.123424.uoNmyc&rd=1&src=newsletter1041631&t=4

The Spectre of 1932: Will Fascism Rise Again in 2012?

The lesson of history is that tough times often reward the desperate and dangerous, from angry demagogues to anarchists and nationalists, from seething mobs to expansionist empires.

chasdarwin1 Comment

From:Daily Mail UK

By:Dominic Sandbrook

N.B.: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  (George Santayana)

“The dawn of a new year is usually a time of hope and ambition,of dreams for the future and thoughts of a better life. But it is a long time since many of us looked forward to the new year with such anxiety, even dread.

Here in Britain, many economists believe that by the end of 2012 we could well have slipped into a second devastating recession. The Coalition remains delicately poised; it would take only one or two resignations to provoke a wider schism and a general election.

But the real dangers lie overseas. In the Middle East, the excitement of the Arab Spring has long since curdled into sectarian tension and fears of Islamic fundamentalism. And with so many of the world’s oil supplies concentrated in the Persian Gulf, British families will be keeping an anxious eye on events in the Arab world.

Meanwhile, as the eurozone slides towards disaster, the prospects for Europe have rarely been bleaker. Already the European elite have installed compliant technocratic governments in Greece and Italy, and with the markets now putting pressure on France, few observers can be optimistic that the Continent can avoid a total meltdown.

As commentators often remark, the world picture has not been grimmer since the dark days of the mid-Seventies, when the OPEC oil shock, the rise of stagflation and the surge of nationalist terrorism cast a heavy shadow over the Western world.

For the most chilling parallel, though, we should look back exactly 80 years, to the cold wintry days when 1931 gave way to 1932.

Then as now, few people saw much to mourn in the passing of the old year. It was in 1931 that the Great Depression really took hold in Europe, bringing governments to their knees and plunging tens of millions of people out of work.

Then as now, the crisis had taken years to gather momentum. After the Wall Street Crash in 1929 – just as after the banking crisis of 2008 – some observers even thought that the worst was over.

But in the summer of 1931, a wave of banking panics swept across central Europe. As the German and Austrian financial houses tottered, Britain’s Labour government came under fierce market pressure to slash spending and cut benefits.

Bitterly divided, the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald decided to resign from office – only to return immediately as the leader of an all-party Coalition known as the National Government, dominated by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives.

Like today’s Coalition, the National Government was an uneasy marriage. Sunk in self-pity and spending much of his time flirting with aristocratic hostesses, MacDonald cut a miserable and semi-detached figure. By comparison, even Nick Clegg looks a model of strong, decisive leadership.

As for the Tory leader Stanley Baldwin, he had more in common with David Cameron than we might think. A laid-back Old Harrovian, tolerant, liberal-minded and ostentatiously relaxed, Baldwin spent as much time as possible on holiday in the South of France, preferring to enjoy the Mediterranean sunshine rather than get his hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of policy.

Meanwhile, far from offering a strong and coherent Opposition, the rump Labour Party seemed doomed to irrelevance. At least its leader, the pacifist Arthur Henderson, could claim to be a man of the people, having hauled himself up by his bootstraps from his early days as a Newcastle metal worker.

Not even his greatest admirers could possibly say the same of today’s adenoidal, stammering Opposition leader, the toothless Ed Miliband.

With the politicians apparently impotent in the face of the economic blizzard, many people were losing faith in parliamentary democracy. Their despair was hardly surprising: in some industrial towns of the North, Wales and Scotland, unemployment in 1932 reached a staggering 70 per cent.

With thousands more being plunged out of work every week, even the National Government estimated that one in four people were making do on a mere subsistence diet. Scurvy, rickets and tuberculosis were rife; in the slag heaps of Wigan, George Orwell saw ‘several hundred women’ scrabbling ‘in the mud for hours’, searching for tiny chips of coal so they could heat their homes.

Feeling betrayed by mainstream politicians, many sought more extreme alternatives. Then as now, Britain was rocked by marches and demonstrations. In October 1932, a National Hunger March in Hyde Park saw bloody clashes between protesters and mounted policemen, with 75 people being badly injured.

And while Left-wing intellectuals were drawn to the supposedly utopian promise of the Soviet leader Josef Stalin – who turned out to be a brutal tyrant – thousands of ordinary people flocked to the banners of the British Union of Fascists, founded in the autumn of 1932 by the former Labour maverick Sir Oswald Mosley.

Never before or since has the far Right commanded greater British support – a worrying reminder of the potential for economic frustration to turn into demagogic resentment.

But the most compelling parallels between 1932 and 2012 lie overseas, where the economic and political situation was, if anything, even darker.

Eighty years ago, the world was struggling to come to terms with an entirely new financial landscape. In August 1931, the system by which currencies were pegged to the value of gold had fallen apart, with market pressure forcing Britain to pull the pound off the gold standard.

Almost overnight, the system that was supposed to ensure global economic stability was gone. And as international efforts to coordinate a response collapsed, so nations across the world fell back on self-interested economic protectionism.

In August 1932, the British colonies and dominions met in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, and agreed a policy of Imperial Preference, putting high tariffs on goods from outside the Empire. International free trade was now a thing of the past; in this frightening new world, it was every man for himself.

Today’s situation, of course, is even more frightening. Our equivalent of the gold standard – the misguided folly of the euro – is poised on the brink of disaster, yet the European elite refuse to let poorer Mediterranean nations like Greece and Portugal leave the eurozone, devalue their new currencies and start again.

Should the eurozone collapse, as seems perfectly likely given Greece’s soaring debts, Spain’s record unemployment, Italy’s non-existent growth and the growing market pressure on France’s ailing economy, then the consequences would be much worse than when Britain left the gold standard.

The shockwaves across Europe – which could come as early as next spring – would see banks tottering, businesses crashing and millions thrown out of work. For British firms that trade with Europe, as well as holiday companies, airports, travel firms and the City of London itself, the meltdown of the eurozone would be a catastrophe.

And as the experience of 80 years ago suggests, the political and social ramifications would be too terrible to contemplate. For in many ways, the 12 months between the end of 1931 and the beginning of 1933 were the tipping point between democracy and tyranny, the moment when the world plunged from an uneasy peace towards hatred and bloodshed.

In the East, new powers were already on the rise. At the end of 1931, Imperial Japan had already launched a staggeringly brutal invasion of China, the Japanese armies pouring into the disputed province of Manchuria in search of raw materials.

Today the boot is on the other foot, with China ploughing billions into its defence programme and establishing de facto economic colonies across Africa, bringing copper, cobalt and zinc back to the mother country.

Indeed, future historians may well look back and see the first years of the 2010s as the moment when the Chinese Empire began to strengthen its global grip.

In the Soviet Union in 1932, meanwhile, Stalin’s reign of terror was intensifying. With dissent crushed by the all-powerful Communist Party, his state-sponsored collectivisation of the Ukrainian farms saw a staggering 6million die in one of the worst famines in history.

By these standards, the autocratic Vladimir Putin looks almost cuddly.

And yet we should not forget that Putin himself described the fall of the Soviet empire as one of the greatest catastrophes of the century – and that half of all Russian teenagers recently told a survey that Stalin was a wise and strong leader.

By comparison, Europe’s democratic leaders look woolly and vacillating, just as they did back in 1932. Indeed, for the democratic West, this was a truly terrible year.

Democracy itself seemed to be under siege. In France, President Paul Doumer was murdered by an assassin. In Portugal, the authoritarian, ultra-Catholic dictator Antonio Salazar launched a reign of terror that would last into the Seventies. And in Italy, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini strengthened his grip, consolidating Italian power in the looted colonies of Albania and Libya.

Eighty years on, we have no room for complacency. Although the far Right remains no more than a thuggish and eccentric minority, the elected prime ministers of Greece and Italy have already been booted out to make way for EU-approved technocrats for whom nobody has ever voted.

In the new Europe, the will of the people seems to play second fiddle to the demands of Paris and Berlin. And if the eurozone crisis intensifies, then it is no idle fantasy to imagine that Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and their Brussels allies will demand an even greater centralisation of powers, provoking nationalist outrage on the streets of Europe’s capitals.

Sadly, there seems little point in looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover, beleaguered by rising unemployment and tumbling ratings, flailed and floundered towards election defeat.

Today, Barack Obama cuts a similarly impotent, indecisive and isolationist figure. The difference is that in 1932, one of the greatest statesmen of the century, the Democratic politician Franklin D. Roosevelt, was waiting in the wings.

Today, American voters looking for alternatives are confronted only with a bizarre gaggle of has-beens, inadequates and weirdos, otherwise known as the Republican presidential field. And to anybody who cares about the future of the Western world, the prospect of President Ron Paul or President Newt Gingrich is frankly spine-chilling.

Above all, though, the eyes of the world back in 1932 were fixed on Germany. As the Weimar Republic staggered towards oblivion, an obscure Austrian painter was setting his sights on supreme power.

With rising unemployment eating away at the bonds of democratic civility, the National Socialist Party was within touching distance of government.

And in the last days of 1932, after the technocrats and generals had failed to restore order, President Paul von Hindenburg began to contemplate the unthinkable – the prospect of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

We all know what happened next. Indeed, by the end of 1932 the world was about to slide towards a new dark age, an age of barbarism and bloodshed on a scale that history had never known.

Eighty years on, it would be easy to sit back and reassure ourselves that the worst could never happen again. But that, of course, was what people told each other in 1932, too.

The lesson of history is that tough times often reward the desperate and dangerous, from angry demagogues to anarchists and nationalists, from seething mobs to expansionist empires.

Our world is poised on the edge of perhaps the most important 12 months for more than half a century. If our leaders provide the right leadership, then we may, perhaps, muddle through towards slow growth and gradual recovery.

But if the European elite continue to inflict needless hardship on their people; if the markets continue to erode faith in the euro; and if Western politicians waste their time in petty bickering, then we could easily slip further towards discontent and disaster.

The experience of 1932 provides a desperately valuable lesson. As a result of the decisions taken in those 12 short months, millions of people later lost their lives.

Today, on the brink of a new year that could well prove the most frightening in living memory, we can only pray that our history takes a very different path.”

N.B.: Action, not prayer, please…

Emphasis Mine

see:http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/9204-the-spectre-of-1932-will-fascism-rise-again-in-2012

“It can’t happen here?”

chasdarwinLeave a comment

“It Can’t Happen Here is a semi-satirical political novel by Sinclair Lewis published in 1935. It features newspaperman Doremus Jessup struggling against the fascist regime of President Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who resembles Gerald B. Winrod, the Kansas evangelist whose far-right views earned him the nickname “The Jayhawk Nazi“. It serves as a warning that political movements akin to Nazism can come to power in countries such as the United States when people blindly support their leaders.” (From wiki:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here).

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana, The Life of Reason”)

It can happen here, and this concern is raised most appropriately by Robert Freeman in AlterNet March 19:

“In early 1919, Germany put in place a new government to begin rebuilding the country after its crushing defeat in World War I. But the right-wing forces that had led the country into the War and lost the War conspired even before it was over to destroy the new government, the “Weimar Republic.”

They succeeded.

The U.S. faces a similar “Weimar Moment.” The devastating collapse of the economy after eight years of Republican rule has left the leadership, policies, and ideology of the right utterly discredited. But, as was the case with Germany in 1919, Republicans Do Not Intend to Allow the New Government to Succeed (emphasis mine). They will do everything they can to undermine it. If they are successful, the U.S. may yet go the way of Weimar Germany.”

The new government that took over the collapsed country was moderate left, led by the president of the German Socialist party, and the right planned to make it fail:

” …They would do everything they could to make sure that the new government failed.

Their strategy was two-fold: first, stoke the resentment of the population about the calamitous state of its living conditions-no matter that those conditions had been created by the very right-wing oligarchs who now pretended to befriend the little guy. Rage is rage. It is glandular and unseeing. Once catalyzed it is easy to turn on any subject.

And stoking resentment was easy to do. Just before the War ended, the military concocted its most Sensational Lie: the German army hadn’t Actually been Defeated (mine). It had been “stabbed in the back” by communists, traitors, and Jews. It was an easy lie to sell. It entwined an attack on an alien political ideology — liberalism — with the latent, pervasive myth of German racial superiority.

The second strategy of the right was to prevent the new government from succeeding. To begin with, success of the left would conspicuously advertise the failure of the right. Moreover, success by the left would legitimize republican government, so hated by the oligarchs of the right. Much better for the people to be ruled by the self-aggrandizing right-wing autocracy that had governed Germany for centuries.

So the rightists set out to do everything they could to make it Impossible (mine) for the leftists to govern. They would use parliamentary maneuver, shifting coalitions, domination of the new mass media, legislative obstruction, staged public relations spectacles, relentless pressure by narrow but powerful interests, judicial intimidation and, eventually, outright murder of their political opponents.”

Does this sound familiar?

It can only happen here if we drop our guard: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana, The Life of Reason”)

How do we prevent this:  “There is absolutely no substitute for proper preparation.”

see: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/132155