More Unsettling Bedtime Reading

Here is a "blast" not from the past only, but about the present.  Wake up and smell the coffee!

FDR was viscerally and actively anti-fascist and anti-nazi,

 whereas Obama simply is not.

FDR was anti-aristocracy; Obama is pro-aristocracy.

FDR was pro equal-rights; Obama is actually anti equal-rights.

 That’s the reality, not the rhetoric.

America has changed fundamentally since — and away from — the values that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt represented both in his words, and in his actions (that’s to say, in his actual decisions, his choices, as the U.S. President). Though President Barack Obama isn’t radically different from FDR in his words, he’s almost the opposite of FDR in his real governing values and decisions, his real leadership of the United States.

Unfortunately, most people see politics only by words, and ignore realities. But, in some important respects (his actions, his decisions), Barack Obama is — and I hate to say this — actually closer to FDR’s enemies, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, than to FDR. This is true not only regarding the contrast between FDR’s moving America away from enormous wealth-inequality, versus Obama’s moving America toward even higher wealth-inequality than before; it’s yet more starkly exhibited in the international policies of these two post-economic-crash U.S. Presidents, as will be demonstrated here.

So, first, here’s FDR:

Roosevelt believed strongly in equality of rights for all people, even more so than did Winston Churchill, who was a supremacist as regards the alleged special ‘right’ of the British people to rule over the people in India and throughout the remaining colonies of the British Empire. (FDR opposed all empires.) The third member of World War II’s Allied troika of anti-fascists and of anti-nazis, Joseph Stalin, wasn’t merely an imperialist like Churchill was — he didn’t even believe in democracy at all, not even for his own people. In fact, before Hitler invaded Stalin’s USSR in “Operation Barbarossa” on 22 June 1941, Stalin was allied with Hitler. However, Stalin wasn’t a nazi, nor even a fascist at all: he was a communist. He rejected capitalism, he didn’t reject only democracy.

So, let’s first clarify the terms, in order to understand what it means to say that America has changed, from democracy to fascism, and now even to nazism:

Fascism is dictatorship by and for capitalists; i.e., for the owners of corporations, for the controlling stockholders in the biggest firms; that’s to say, for the aristocracy. Mussolini, the first person to establish a fascist government, once defined fascism that way, and approvingly called it also “corporationism.” He believed in privatizing state assets, which he did in 1922-25; see Germa Bel’s “The First Privatization: Selling SOEs,” in the 2011 Cambridge Journal of Economics. (Also here.) Then, Hitler took up privatization; see Bel’s “Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatization in 1930s Germany,” in the 2010 Economic History Review. Chile’s Pinochet, England’s Thatcher, and America’s Reagan, weren’t the first privatizers: privatization went all the way back to fascism’s very founding. It merely became revived after ‘libertarianism’ (which was actually invented by fascist aristocrats — primarily the DuPonts — in the 1930s) blossomed after WWII, because (their beloved) fascism had developed a bad reputation after losing that global war.

Nazism (with a small n, “nazi”; not the German party, which was “Nazi”) is simply racist fascism (the racist form of fascism). Not all fascists are racists: for examples, Italy’s Mussolini wasn’t a racist, and Spain’s Franco also wasn’t. They weren’t opposed to racism; they simply weren’t concerned about it at all. Just as fascism that’s spelled with a small f is the ideology  instead of being the political party  that started it (in Italy); nazism with a small n is the ideology rather than the political party that started that ideology (in Germany).

There are fascists throughout the world, just as there are nazis throughout the world. And, the particular type of supremacism (or “racism”) that different nazis spout, can differ from country to country; so that, for example, nazis from one country can even go to war against nazis from another country, because they want global supremacy for different groups of people.

Similarly, different nazisms might have different hatreds, different types of bigotries: Germany’s nazis during the 1930s hated Jews the most, whereas Ukraine’s nazis hate Russians the most. And, if, in WWII, Germany’s Hitler and Japan’s Tojo had won control respectively of the West and the East, then a war between those two nazis, Hitler and Tojo, might have resulted, in order to subordinate the one of them to the other of them. Nazi countries can, and sometimes do, go to war against each other.

So: basically, nazism is racist fascism. It’s also — and more precisely — known as supremacist fascism. A good example of a fascist who was not a supremacist is Spain’s Franco.  Another way to think of nazism is as its being extremist fascism; and, in this sense, we today know of ISIS and Al Qaeda as Islamic nazi groups, or as Islamic supremacist-fascist groups. Everyone knows that they are also extremists.  Mussolini’s teacher, Vilfredo Pareto, was called “the Karl Marx of fascism,” and his core message was that the democratic belief that each person has the same rights is false; that there is a natural hierarchy; and that inferiors naturally exist for the benefit of their superiors. This attitude is at its most extreme in nazis, all the way from Hitler to ISIS; it extends to all supremacists.  Whereas peace can exist among democracies, nazisms are always at war; it’s their nature; it is their essence, because they are supremacists. They demand their own supremacy. (In America, some nazis are called “Dominionists.” It’s just a form of supremacism.) That’s why nazis tend to be especially attracted to war: war truly is their natural condition.  Regarding the other two types of dictatorships: Fascisms and communisms aren’t necessarily always at war: for examples, Spain’s Franco was peaceful after winning power, and Cuba’s Castro could have been peaceful if the U.S. hadn’t been constantly trying to overthrow him. There is nothing intrinsically supremacist about either fascism or communism, though both tend toward a certain amount of supremacism, because they both deny equality of rights; but nazism is intrinsically supremacist; nazism is supremacism; supremacism is nazism. By contrast, a mere fascist can be satisfied to be supreme only at home, without extending it abroad to dominate the entire world.

Nazism is the most dangerous ideology that exists. It is the most extreme denial of equality of rights. It is the most extreme denial of democracy. It doesn’t just say that aristocrats are superior; it says that everyone else should be their slaves, or else dead. It is the most extreme embodiment of Pareto’s view.

I would at this time like to introduce a new term to you.  You've heard of electrical induction, or magnetic induction, terms in physics.  President Obama is a racism inductor.  That is he actually INDUCES people twords racism and BRINGS BY HIS OWN ACTIONS negative (and racist) media press on the topic of race or "playing the race card" as the media has come to put it.  It's like "pin pricks" enough to rile up the Enemy but not NEARLY ENOUGH to demonstrate he has ANY notion of actually tackeling the problem.  I'll cite examples.  In the instance about police "behaving stupidly" this was a FACTUAL and if any thing MILD criticism of what those officers did to harrass a man trying to get into his own home.  He then complicates the matter by proposing a "Beer Summit" a term guaranteed to spawn riticule.  In the case of Trayvon Martin - - not ONCE did he attack the farcical procedings of the court trial itself, as an insult to jurisprudence, and attackable on so many legal grounds you'd go blind trying to read them all.  The trial was a racist SHOW CIRCUS and the media played it as such - - as a vehicle for- - herolding the new truth that yes, Whites DO have the right to gun down Blacks in cold blood.  That trial did to civil rights what Oliver North did to the idea of following the law congress laid down.  Then we have the Ferguson shooting of Brown, where Eric Holder SAID he was going to investigate but we've heard NOTHING and my guess NOTHING is about what we can expect.   Thom Hartman had this Black man on his program this morning talking about a disabled man who had a malfunctioning security alarm do to a mistake the installers of the system had made.  The police ruffed this guy up in his own house, or just outside, and would have done more except a White woman stepped in to his defense, and the cops backed off after this woman had vouched for his character.  But here's the kicker.  Had it been a BLACK woman who had intervened on his behalf, not only would the man have been arrested but the woman who stepped in to help would ALSO have been arrested for "interfering with law enforcement".  You know this.  The President is indeed pro aristocracy and pro priveleged.  And frankly, his economics are more fascist than anything else if you look at the President's record of promoting Fed welfare to the rich, or the President's utter reluctance to get involved in ANY worker or labor dispute, where his sway would have gone a long way twords influencing the outcome of many events in states ruled by Republican governors.

I had Bill Carol on and today he was calling proposition 47 the “Make life easy for criminals” proposition.  Bill Carol went on to list these reduced penalty crimes and I have just reviewed the list myself on-line.  Bill Carol claimed violent crimes were included and then adds “because these crimes have victims”.   Obviously Bill is conflating violent crimes with victimless crimes.  Nobody said the list was identical.  He says the money saving is bogus “because we all know that with even twenty percent of the inmate population removed- - that State prisons will still be filled to capacity”.   I’m just wondering in passing what it says sociologically that the crime rate is down and yet our state prisons have never been fuller, so much that the national courts feel the need to intervene.  Nobody is saying that is someone burgles your house and takes out your sound system that you shouldn’t be mad and want justice.  But I guess the question is whether it should be 25 years to live for a non violent domestic burglary.  Bill never made it clear how he feels about all these drug user convictions and whether being warehoused away is the best thing for them.   Conservatives love that term “accountability for one’s action” but it doesn’t apply to Bristol Paylen and her out of wedlock pregnancy or Newt Gringinch and his two controversial divorces, or the two time felon wanna be mayor of Providence.   It doesn’t apply to so much as one big time Wall Street crook or big time politicians such as Governor Christie.  It doesn’t apply to corporate polluters who lie to the public.   At some point- - at the end of Rush – and having had enough K-K-KFI I just went outside and began trolling for cigarettes.  I didn’t find any.  It is now approaching twenty to three and I’ve had three already, which is not as good as many days recently- - but would be considered damn good almost any other day outside the past three weeks or so.   One time I saw Bill this morning and headed the other way because I didn’t want to be tempted by even the offer of a cigarette.   Capish?

We the American people have never voted personally on Federal Court Justices.  These have always been appointed by the President directly and approved by the senate.  I didn’t know ALL Federal Justices were appointed from the top down.  Now this guy from Ashville, NC - - Antony Cogburn (?) has ruled that “equal rights for gay marriage is settled law”.   Now there are gay marriages going on in Nevada and Alaska.   So I guess Idaho by now must see the writing on the wall since they have been “stayed” for the moment but are also in that left leaning Ninth Circuit Court.   Predictably, the idea of that nurse contracting Ebola from that Duncan patient who died last week in Dallas, has gotten flack from the right wingers.  There “was a breech in medical protocol”, which sounds about as euphemistically generic as a “wardrobe malfunction”   [drum riff sound effect]

In terms of my own predictive ability, clearly my longstanding prediction - - well, from January of this year (which seems like an eternity) about a rapture or at least some sort of “game changer” of an event, seems to have failed.  Everybody in the past several thousand years who has ever predicted any supernatural intervention on Planet Earth, has come up empty so by no means am I the first.  I did get a blog off this morning.  I plan to look more at Proposition 47 which I heard Law Enforcement was all for.  And a lot of newspapers are for the measure.  But even Paul has voted down anti crime measures supported by Law Enforcement, if they cost any money.  Franklin Roosevelt used to mock at Republicans saying “They claim that they are for all the same things we are including a Social Security plan.  But they can do it better and more efficiently, and the best thing aqbout their plan is - that it won’t cost anybody anything!”   That’s a good knee slapper.