We've been living in a fascist (corporatist) nation since...

[IndyOp]

Mussolini's definition of fascism was "corporatism." The most powerful businessman in each region of Italy represented the region in the government. If the business was illegal - well, that just made it all the more profitable.

What about the good 'ol USA? How long has our government been of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations?

:shrug:

[eallen]

1. At least since the revolutionary era. America has been a nation of business since its founding.

Although Jefferson wrote some about the virtues of an agrarian economy, that was quickly fading and partly mythical even in his day. The southern plantations, such as the one that Jefferson ran, were in fact significant-sized businesses. New England whaling was rising at the time, and would soon supply the world with oil, creating quite a few Nantucket millionaires. Early 19th century New England became wealthy with that, with ship building, with the Atlantic trade, including the slave trade, with banking, and with other industry. Canal and railroad companies made fortunes in the early 19th century. And coal and steel on the back of them.

America has been a nation of business since its founding. The notion that that is something new is a complete and utter myth.

:hippie:

[John Q. Citizen]

4. The structure of modern corporations is different.

The wealthy do have more influence than the masses, but then they die. Corporation used to be heavily regulated, chartered by states and restricted to one business.

Now they have the status of personhood, almost no regulation, and never die.


That is what is new.

[Trillo]

7. Corporate Welfare under Lincoln

The concept of obscene corporate welfare seemed to have started with Lincoln, apparently to win the Civil War.

Railroads and industry.

Edited to add: It seems this may be the beginning of the military-industrial complex.

[Trillo]

43. This page says U.S. Corporation created in 1871

and that we have dual systems, a constitutional system and a corporate one, both of which relate somehow to citizenship.

a " Corporation" of England
Created (Incorporated) by (Presidential) Legislative Act in 1871, Forty-first Congress, Session III, Chapter 62, page 419

>snip<

Started with Gettysburg Address in 1864, and the Incorporation of District of Columbia by (Presidential) Legislative Act of February 21, 1871, under the Emergency War Powers Act and the Reconstruction Acts.
Then reorganized June 11, 1878

>snip<

The President (a Caesar)
rules by Executive Order
(Unconstitutional)

Congress and the Courts
are under the President. The President is the Chief Executive Officer (C.E.O.) of the government corporation. Impeachment today is nearly impossible, unless it is in the best interest of the controlling bankers
and the one-world government.
Also, what most people do not realize is that most courts today are legislative courts.

The so-called (corporate) Congress sits by resolution
not by positive law.


http://www.gemworld.com/USAvsUS.htm

Since I'm not an academic, I really don't know what to make of it. I find it kind of curious.

[eallen]

10. No, that's a myth. Corporations were LESS regulated in 19th century.

The notion that corporations counted as persons under the 14th amendment obviously didn't come about until after the 14th amendment was ratified, in 1867. While that was a stupid Supreme Court decision, it doesn't have that great an impact on corporate regulation, much of which is business regulation, regardless of the form of the business. Corporations and businesses generally were lightly regulated in the 19th century. The increased regulation of the 20th century was partly the result of not liking the economic consequences of private banks issuing their own currency, partly the result of organized labor, partly the result of concerns with newer technologies, and largely a result of the fact that increased wealth brought these issues into the scope of what could be afforded.

:hippie:

[EST]

14. That may be a little shortsighted.

Crooked corporatism and a crooked stock market brought on the great, world wide depression of the twenties and thirties.

The notion of corporate "person hood" was instituted well over a hundred years ago and crooked corporatism has been busy destroying middle America ever since with every weapon at their disposal, including assassination and open murder.

It is undoubtedly true that their stranglehold, nationally and internationally, is worse now than it has ever been before, but brooding fascism has been a part of our struggle ever since we were mere colonies.

Check out a really good biography of Teddy Roosevelt, one that is not just a sympathetic treatment, for some pretty good illustrations of crony capitalism, corporate greed and the control they exerted on the government of that time.

[IndyOp]

6. Your post is one I was anticipating -- that's why there is a

Pre-Eisenhower option and an "other" option.

It does seem lost on most people that the US Declaration of Independence from the Rule of English Kings clashed just a bit with our slave-based, expansionist, imperialistic tendencies...

Howard Zinn's "People's History" woke me up.

I do think, however, that there was a time around Jefferson's Era when the people were far more awake to the realities of this nation than they are now. Also during the rise of the Unions circa late 1800's and early 1900's people were more aware.

Our awareness IS the antidote to fascism.

Regulated capitalism I can live with.

Hegemony is going to drive us and all humans to extinction FAST.

[John Q. Citizen]

2. shouted out, who killed the Kennedys, well don't you know it was IT&T n/t

[IndyOp]

11. You've been to some marches I didn't attend...

I didn't make it to any marches until the run-up to the Iraq War.

What's this about IT&T -- is that Bell Helicopter?

:shrug:

[John Q. Citizen]

24. International Telephone and Telegraph. I was joking actually, but I trace

the loss of human power to the corporate state at about the time of the Kennedy assasination.

ITT was a prime mover (along with our government)in the overthrow of the elected Government of Salvador Allende in Chile.

The line in my subject is a play on the Stones tune, Sympathy for the Devil.

[annabanana]

26. So. Are we old yet?

sorry. . . It's my 57th today and I'm feeling a bit creaky. .

[John Q. Citizen]

28. Happy birthday. I'm not far behind you. I'll be 52 before years end. n/t

[IndyOp]

29. Okay - just for the record I knew what IT&T stood for...

I was just wondering about the business connections... IT&T -- AT&T -- Bell -- Bell Helicopter the LUCKY contractor for the Vietnam War. I just watched a video about LBJ and the Kennedy assassination and Bell Helicopter is mentioned several times.

[independentpiney]

3. The Korean War- military and arms spending actually

dropped between 1945- June, 1950. The Truman doctrine and domino theory ramped it up permanently.

[porphyrian]

5. There's a difference between capitalism and corporatism.

I'm not sure everyone responding is making that distinction. America was built as a business venture, but the power was given to the people, not to corporations. Corporate "personhood," and the ability to buy representation in government, are problems with fascism/corporatism rather than capitalism.

[IndyOp]

9. I appreciate your distinctions - still America was built on dirty business

and imperialistic tendencies. Genocide of Native Americans as we expanded westward, land taken from Mexico and France via war, war on people's of Third World nations who had the raw materials and markets we desired. Very dirty business...

Corporate personhood and ability to buy representation in government are surely fascism/corporatism AND the elements of the American business venture that remind me of the mafia have been in place even when we had truly regulated capitalism (pre-corporate personhood; pre-business elite activist judges).

[porphyrian]

17. I didn't mean to seem dismissive of those things, I just didn't mention them...

...because they were tertiary to the point I was making. Colonialism and imperialism are what inflicted us on the natives, and they are traditions we didn't entirely dispense with when we declared independence from England. In fact, they were embraced by many a greedy and less-than-scrupulous businessman. I just wanted to make the distinction between fascism and capitalism.

[EST]

21. Good points, but I'm not so sure that I would include the part

about land taken from Mexico through war.

Wasn't Texas, for instance, asking for statehood and protection from Mexico and its controlling families?

It seems that I recall that much of the land in question was only claimed by Mexico for less than fifty years and even then was considered more of a land grab by them than by the US.

Of course, much of what is now the southern states was taken from France at gunpoint, but the vast tract that made up most of the mid-west and west was purchased, albeit a forced sale, given that France - or at least the rulers thereof - was pretty desperate for cash at that point.

And (darkly) ALL of that territory was stolen from the folks who had been living there for fifteen or twenty thousand years.

[IndyOp]

22. I think you are far more familiar with the history of that region than am I...

I just know that many Mexicans believe today they will someday get California back.

:eyes:

[EST]

33. They may, simply by moving in and squatting.

Mexico only claimed the territory for about forty years until it was settled, actually pretty peaceably-they kind of just backed off-although they regretted the hell out of not sticking to their guns after 1849. Gold rush greed.

I am not a skilled historian and I compliment you on making the discussion so interesting-thanks! Very enjoyable.

[John Q. Citizen]

39. The Spanish were in CA, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Nevada from

the early 1500's. They claimed it and set up forts, outposts, vice royalties, missions, and other administrative districts administered from Mexico. In 1821, when Mexico gained independence from Spain, it became part of the Mexican Nation.

They didn't just "back off" The US under Polk went to war to grab it, and grab it we did. Mexico lost about half it's sovereign territory in that war. Polk wanted the land to create more slave owning states within the US. The Mexican American war ended in 1848, the same year that Sutter found gold in a mill race in the foothills of the Sierras.

[EST]

42. Thanks for the further detail and clarification!

[John Q. Citizen]

34. The Mexican American war planned and executed by James Polk. He used

a three prong strategy to achieve what he wanted, which was expansion into Mexico to establish new slave states. These three strategies were,

A. Fomenting revolution in Texas
B. Attempting to buy the southwest from Mexico
C. A false flag operation where he secretly sent US troops into Mexico and attacked a town and then publicly claimed Mexican Troops had attacked our troops on our soil.

Read about "Spotty Lincoln" here. http://www.american-buddha.com/911.syntheticterrormadeusa.htm

Free registration required, but it's well worth it. You get access to a lot of books and articles, movie screen plays. They call it there online library.

It's in chapter XII of Tarpley's book.


Page 308

For Lincoln was, in his youth, confronted with a situation very much like our own after 9/11 and the beginning of continuous warfare.

SPOTTY LINCOLN

For the young Lincoln, the question regarded the James K. Polk administration's policy towards Mexico. Polk was a slaveholder and a proto-Confederate who wanted to expand US territory towards the south in such a way as to increase the power and influence of the slave bloc. Polk was willing to make sweeping territorial concessions to the British in regard to the disputed Oregon Territory, where he repudiated the famous "fifty-four forty or fight" slogan in favor of a rotten compromise. By contrast, Polk's entire administration was devoted to tireless efforts to embroil the US in an aggressive war with Mexico. Polk first sent an envoy named Stockton to meet with the leaders of Texas, urging them to start a conflict with Mexico which the US could then portray as a new outrage perpetrated by the dictator Santa Anna. But Sam Houston wisely rejected this proposal, and would not act as Polk's provocateur. The best study of this attempt is Glenn W. Price's The Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue ( 1967), and it can be shown to those who assert that conspiracies do not exist. Here was one which tried to provoke war but failed.

Later, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to take a military force across the Nueces River to the Rio Grande. The international border between Texas and Mexico was then about halfway between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. When Taylor's forces got to the present site of Brownsville, Texas on the northern bank of the Rio Grande, they marched across Mexican farms and into the middle of a Mexican township located there. This inevitably led to fighting in which some of the US troopers were killed. Polk then used this incident as a pretext for extorting a declaration of war from the US Congress: after all, US troops had been killed by Mexicans on US soil! The Mexican War of 1846-1848 was on. The armed clash provoked by Polk became the 9/11 tocsin for the Mexican War. The pressure on any politician to go along with Polk's orchestrated incident was as great as today's pressure to go along with the 9/11 myth.

In the midst of the war hysteria, some of the better Americans of the age refused to go along. One was Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay a special surtax connected with the conflict. Former President John Quincy Adams led a group of antislavery northeastern Whigs called the Immortal Fourteen who voted against Polk's supplemental budget request to fund the army in the field.

Abraham Lincoln in early 1848 was an obscure Illinois Whig and admirer of Henry Clay who had just arrived in Washington to begin serving his term as a member of the US House of Representatives. We are dealing here not with Lincoln the war president who saved the union, but rather with Lincoln as a member of the opposition during another war -- the Mexican War. Polk's 1848 State of the Union address was a defense of the administration's policy in regard to Mexico. This was the first major speech that Lincoln heard after being sworn in as a congressman. Polk was an earlier president who could never admit to having been mistaken:


more....

[John Q. Citizen]

27. Before the Robber Barons we had the Banking Cartels. The mafia

sprang up as a result of prohibition and was actually kind of a democratization of organized crime in that it offered a way in to the biz for groups that weren't WASP's.

[eallen]

12. Corporations buying favorable legislative consideration is nothing new.

If I had my way, corporations wouldn't be allowed to spend money on political purposes. Period. Anyone lobbying for a corporation would simply be jailed.

But the cooperation between business and legislature is nothing new.

:hippie:

[porphyrian]

18. I didn't mean to imply that buying influence in government was something new.

However, when the distinction between government and corporations becomes clouded, that is a distinctly fascist trait.

[eallen]

20. I don't see that it is any more clouded now than in the 19th century.

With the exception of a few QGOs, I don't think it is cloudy at all. Jeffrey Immelt, to use the example of GE, that was hilariously attributed by one poster to deciding how long the US would stay in Iraq, is not a member of the government. Nancy Pelosi is. And her role as Congressman is distinct from her role as business owner.

:hippie:

[porphyrian]

31. That's only considering a few factors.

Legislators are powerful employees who often enjoy careers as politicians. As campaign success has been equated with the amount of money one is able to raise, corporate lobbists have come to hold more influence over politicians than you or I as individuals. Added to the rampant outsourcing of government functions to corporations (which has been going on in Florida, thanks to JEB!, for quite some time), I think there has been considerable clouding of the line. Certainly you aren't denying this.

[eallen]

40. I suspect there is more lobbying influence today. But outsourcing?

Over the last two centuries we've seen the government adopt many functions that previously were only privately done, such as issuance of currency, naval action under letters marque, and much else.

[porphyrian]

41. I'm saying the lobbying and outsourcing are connected.

I'm not saying outsourcing is a new phenomenon. I'm saying that it is being pushed at a time when lobbyists have more government influence than we, the people. Who do you think gets the outsourcing contracts? It was no accident that, say, Halliburton got a competition-free no-bid contract to "rebuild" Iraq. I'm not really connecting dots in new ways. Are you really unaware of what I'm saying, or are you just pointing out other historical facts?

[smitty]

8. Mussolini never defined corporatism in the simplistic way you

describe.

Corporatism can be defined as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units (social and economic sectors) are organized into a limited number of singular, noncompetitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (or created) by the state and granted a deliberate monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls.

[IndyOp]

16. Here is my head on a platter just for you...

I probably did say it too simply, but it's close enough for a psychologist. If I were an economist, business person or historian, I'd be a little more concerned.

[Cleita]

13. Other. Since the days of the robber barons.

Although, we experienced periods of regulation since then, we seem to have lost that and are back to square one.

[ThomWV]

15. I Think It Grew Out Of The World Wide Depression Of The 20's

Taking root first in Europe and certainly Japan, but not really getting to us until US industry geared up for WW-II. Then it lay idle, not yet in control of Government, until Korea, after that there was no stopping it.

[MGD]

19. It began around 1920 IMO. The Itallian model of fascism was respected by many in America

and despised by others. Mussolini is generally considered to be the father of fascism. He and his ideas were well respected here in America and elsewhere where socialism and communism were regarded suspiciously. Elements of facsism existed prior to that as far back as the 1790's but there was a relative balance. There still is as we proved on November 7th. just MHO.

[smitty]

23. Most people use "fascism" as a pejorative

epithet and so the word has lost its meaning. But back in the 20s, 30s and 40s many people in Europe, Asia, the United States, Canada, Latin America and the Middle East regarded fascism as a viable alternative to communism AND capitalism.

"You're the top!
Your the great Houdini!
You're the top!
You are Mussolini!"

Cole Porter wrote those lyrics in 1934, he later altered them.

[IndyOp]

32. Okay, now that you've mentioned Cole Porter -

How do you (how did they) distinguish between capitalism and fascism? Is fascism inherently anti-democratic?

My naive, simple way of thinking about the conflict between democracy and unregulated capitalism is that democracy is power shared while in an unregulated capitalistic nation the power concentrates in the hands of a few.

FDR specifically pushed for passage of the Estate Tax legislation because he believed that democracy could not survive if estates grew and money was passed down from generation to generation.

Correct me if I am wrong, please - you got my attention with the Cole Porter lyrics.

:hi:

[Cleita]

37. Actually, I find Nazi fills my need for fascist perjoratives and

true (not Soviet or present day)communism has a sort of appeal these days although I would prefer to water it down with regulated capitalism and socialism.

[MrSlayer]

25. From the beginning. It's just been interrupted a few times.

The current period started from the death of FDR who was the last interrupter. As soon as he died the scumbags started to dismantle everything he built up. JFK would have been an interrupter of it but they killed him. It's been going on from day one.

[IndyOp]

30. I got chills when I watched Kennedy's acceptance speech from

Hyannis Port the morning after he won the election. He mentions Eisenhower and that Eisenhower was going to telegraph information he should have...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x7145

I wonder who Eisenhower was rooting for - Nixon or Kennedy?

[applegrove]

35. There is a small segment of Americans that want things to go their way

all the time. And they hate the Democrats or any middle class person who may vote for a democrat. Private schools, private clubs, private this and that... health care...and they are not connected to the people of the USA as a whole.

[Jcrowley]

36. Depends on who you mean

by "we" and how you define fascism. The range of liberty in America has always been rather narrow and perched upon a precarious ledge. We should perhaps ask Chief Seattle or Daniel Shays or Sojourner Truth this question.

Matewan

[mitchum]

38. 1776