Giant Federal Bailouts or Fascist Coup d’Etat?

Yesterday, On December 16, the Fed dropped the US interest rate to .25%. WTF?  I mean, if Japan’s long recession (eerily similar to the global slowdown about to impact all y’all) had only ended well, that would be one thing, but sadly, no, their economy is also suffering now. And like the Japanese government, the Fed is painting all of us into a corner. With nowhere to go with interest rates, we will be without recourse as the recession deepens.

This global crisis enables (or even requires) change in state control over an increasingly unfree society. Already we have seen the fusion of state and financial interests: the federal bailout of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, AIG and the October Baal-out of the financial sector that will eventually cost taxpayers over a trillion dollars, and the impending bailout of the auto industry that will gut union strength.

All of these measures are now necessary responses to this financial disaster, while also events that centralize dangerous amounts of power.  While some may see the financial slowdown as evidence of the decline of the American Empire, others view recent developments in the giant government bailout as steps toward fascism.

While comparisons between the current times and the 1930s are being made regularly by pundits and politicians, the likeness could be even more troubling than the apparently unsettling economic similarities. Although seen as a turn to the left by free-market adherents, the giant government bailout of financial institutions, or the nationalization of risk and loss, and subsidization of Wall Street profits more closely resembles a move toward classical fascism.

Under a fascist government the modes of production are privately owned while controlled by the state. This economic system generates big profits for the wealthy, regulatory agencies with vested interest in the system that they pretend to regulate, and a government dedicated to social control and maximizing profits for their partners in the business world. This “iron triangle” smothers the citizenry, it’s impervious to market forces because it’s shielded by federal bailouts and state control.

It maintains the status quo through campaigns of propaganda and terror, de-politicizing voters through structural violence, criminalization, religious brainwashing, misogyny, over-medication, substandard education, surveillance, material insecurity, consumer avarice, child and spouse abuse and social upheaval. Political consciousness and mobilization threaten the status quo, and therefore the wealth of the wealthy, the power of the powerful and the hegemony of the hegemon.

Where this gets funny ( in a “holy shit I can’t believe we just let them fuck us like that — we are actually more retarded than all those ‘good’ Germans who watched the cattle cars rumble by” kind of way) is that the Bush family has been trying to turn the US into a fascist country for decades. A couple of  months ago, and unnoticed by most election-obsessed Americans, The  Huffington Post reported that the BBC News had gone to all the trouble to dig up PUBLIC RECORDS (oh to have a fourth estate) that showed unequivocally that Prescott Bush was part of a conspiracy of Wall Street businessmen and Nazi sympathizers who tried to remove FDR from power in order to implement a fascist regime.

Larisa Alexandrovna, another reporter from the Huffington Post, went further and connected earlier attempts by Prescott Bush to manifest American fascism to his grandson’s current administration. George W. Bush and his administration not only oversaw dramatic redistribution of wealth from the poor to the wealthy, manipulated election results, and the growth of the war machine, but also gutted and corrupted regulatory agencies, and incubated this absurdly, fantastically, unimaginably expensive economic crisis.

Granted the 2008 election went very well, and I do believe that the incoming administration will serve the American people instead of rob, poison and murder them. However, once the power of the state has expanded, it doesn’t easily contract. Freedom must be constantly enacted. We have to live it, demand it, scrutinize it, and continually reconnect it with current events and legitimate historical analysis. In other words, we can’t suffer from amnesia, forgetting past crimes and adminsistrative misdeeds. And we can’t consent to “gentlemenly” etiquette rules of behavior, where holding public officials accountable is somehow lowbrow, but it’s classy to give a standoing ovation to outgoing criminal/senator Ted Stevens.

Let’s investigate! Let’s support Representative  Kucinich and other bold leaders, and while the boat for impeachment may have sailed, cases could be made for treason, war crimes and graft. Don’t let the self-congradulatory feelings of electing a fit president allow us, as a nation, to slip into short-term lazy complaceny, or the conditions of the potential depression force panic inspired compliance. The damage done by the Bush administration is deep and drastic, and could well outlast the  Obama administration and even the economic crisis if we allow. History will  not absolve us unless we distinguish ourself as a citizenry from the crimes and misdeeds perpetuated in our names.