The Threat of U.S. Fascism: A Historical Precedent
Perhaps the most alarming slice of twentieth-century U.S. history is virtually unknown to the general public, including most scholars of American history. One hopes that a recent BBC documentary titled The Plot Against America and an article of the same name by Columbia Law School professor and longtime human rights activist Scott Horton, on the website of Harper's magazine, will sound an alert.
In 1934 a special Congressional committee was appointed to conduct an investigation of a possible planned coup intended to topple the administration of president Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace it with a government modeled on the policies of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives. While the coup attempt was reported at the time in a few newspapers, including The New York Times, the story disappeared from public memory shortly after the Congressional findings were made available to president Roosevelt. It was the recent release from the Archives of the Congressional report that prompted the BBC and Horton commentaries. The Congressional committee had discovered that some of the foremost members of the economic elite, many of them household names at the time, had indeed hatched a meticulously detailed and massively funded plot to effect a fascist coup in America. The owners of Bird's Eye, Maxwell House and Heinz, among others, totaling about twenty four major businessmen and Wall Street financiers, planned to assemble a private army of half a million men, composed largely of unemployed veterans. These troops would both constitute the armed force behind the coup and defeat any resistance this in-house revolution might generate. The economic elite would provide the material resources required to sustain the new government. The plotters hoped that widespread working-class discouragement at the stubborn persistence of the Great Depression would have sufficiently disenchanted the masses with FDR's policies to make the coup an easy ride. And they were appalled at Roosevelt's willingness after 1933 to initiate economic policies that economists and businessmen considered dangerously Leftist departures from economic orthodoxy. Only a fascist-style government, they thought, could enforce the kind of economic "discipline" that would reverse the Great Depression and restore profits. Interestingly, it was a military man, a prominent retired general assigned the task of raising the 500,000-man army, who blew the whistle after pondering the grotesque implications of the undemocratic installation of a fascist dictatorship in Washington. FDR was thus able to nip the plot in the bud. The president might have used the occasion to alert the public to the anti-democratic impulses of a major segment of the capitalist class. But this of course would only have bolstered the fortunes of Communist, Socialist and other anti-capitalist political tendencies here, which were already gaining some ground among artists, intellectuals and a surprising number of working people. ...More |
The link is down or else I'd read the whole article and give a better reply, but anyway.
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damn it !
sorry about that Quote:
No army was needed ... democracy was circumvented and fascist capitalisim slowly manuvered into place.. edit: yes the link is indeed dead.... I thought it would be back by now 2 days later.. :dunno: |
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Multi
...It is well known that Hollywood screenwriting in the 1930s was replete with Communist-inspired sentiment. And of course we must not forget that FDR was himself a (somewhat renegade) member of the very class that would have toppled him. While FDR was open to watered-down Keynesian policies in a way that very few of his class comrades were, his commitment (like Keynes's) to the "free enterprise" system was unconditional. He had no interest in publicizing a plot that might constitute a public-relations victory for anti-capitalist politics. He therefore refused to out the plotters, and sought no punitive measures against them. In the end, class solidarity carried the day for Roosevelt. The Congressional committee cooperated by refusing to reveal the names of many of the key plotters. Thus, fascist tendencies gestating deep within the culture of the U.S. ruling class were effectively left to develop unhindered by mass political mobilization. Might this grisly episode have important implications for our understanding of the current political moment? One may be inclined to think so on the basis of the fact that one of the architects of the plot was one Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush. Bush, along with many other big businessmen, had maintained friendly relations in 1933 and 1934 with the new German government of Chancellor Adolph Hitler, and was designated to form for his class conspirators a working relationship with that government. While Bush-bashing is highly recommended, the implications of this unsettling piece of history for contemporary politics run deeper than many of us would like to think. There is the temptation to point triumphantly to George W. Bush's commitment to the irrelevance of the Constitution, which he has sneeringly referred to as "a piece of paper", his corresponding contempt for hitherto taken-for-granted fundamental human rights, his Hobbesian notion of unbridled sovereignty, his militarized notion of political power and corresponding bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy - there is the temptation to regard these genuinely fascist elements as the most significant contemporary remnant of the 1934 conspiracy. But no less important is the utter absence in 1934 of liberal attempts to educate the public to, and mobilize the population against, the fascist threat. FDR stood down. Although Rooseveltian/New Deal liberalism is dead, contemporary Democrats do sustain one of FDR's least seemly qualities, namely his refusal to encourage effective mass opposition to fascist and imperialist politics. John Kerry boasted of having contributed to the drafting of the Patriot Act. And in the most recent round of crucial legislation regarding the war in Iraq, the Democrats gave Bush everything he wanted. All the major presidential contenders of both parties support a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. None has repudiated the concept that Uncle sam is and should ever be the global hegemon. And most importantly, none has repudiated the Neoliberal Consensus, the notion that the market should be left to operate as "freely" as the public can be persuaded to allow it to act, and, crucially, that this is a model that should be imposed globally through the power of the U.S. working in tandem with such powerful global institutions as the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. To the extent that this policy has been successful, inequalities between national classes and between the global North and South have widened dramatically since the decline of the Keynesian consensus in the mid-1970s. Since the Mondale candidacy, no Democrat has had a full-employment plank in his presidential platform. The median wage has been in secular decline since 1973, and the distribution of national income between capital and labor has not been as skewed toward capital since the Great Depression. But no member of either party has made a major issue of this. One of the most powerful obstacles to appreciating the relevance of the 1934 planned coup to our times is the virtually ubiquitous misconception that the gross inequalities and anti-working-class policies now evident, and the reckless carnage that characterizes U.S. foreign policy, is the result of the "neoconservative revolution" ushered in by George W. Bush. But it was Clinton's cynical jettisoning of his relatively progressive Economic Stimulus Plan, his abolition of "welfare as we know it" without providing a replacement, and his ruthless bombing of Yugoslavia and "sanctions" against Iraq that both foreshadowed and paved the way for Bush's atrocities. The truism that the Democratic Party has moved ever closer to the Republicans since the Carter administration must not be forgotten. Indeed it is an understatement. To fully appreciate the reality of democratic capitulation as an alleged "opposition party" we need only reflect upon the consequences of Clinton's sanctions against Iraq. Clinton bombed Iraq several times weekly for eight years. Defense Information Agency documents, now available through the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that the strategy of the bombing was to extensively bomb water purification facilities and power generating facilities with the explicit intention to spread diseases that would affect children. The idea was to pressure ordinary Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, with the knowledge that if they did so, the pedicide would cease. But Iraqis blamed Washington for this catastrophe, not Saddam. When Saddam offered to accede to Clinton's requirements for ending the bombing, Clinton abruptly replied that no possible concessions on Saddam's part would lead him to end the bombing/sanctions. Extensive investigations by widely respected sources, including the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet, determined that the number of Iraqi children who died as a direct result of the pedicidal bombardment was 467,000. And it added a fact unreported in the U.S. media, that the U.S. use of depleted uranium in the attacks had resulted in the first known cases of breast cancer afflicting four-year-old girls. When Clinton's Secretary of state Madeline Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl in 1996 on 60 Minutes whether she thought that the removal of Saddam from power was worth killing a half million children, she replied that "Yes, it was worth it." Is this qualitatively different from the death and destruction that Bush has wrought? Of course not. The British playwright Harold Pinter has characterized both Clinton and Bush as "mass murderers", and the accusation sounds indeed brutal. But is it accurate? How can one deny that it is? Today's Democrats' abdication of the role of opposition party is far more consequential than Roosevelt's decision to permit our embryonic fascists to continue to gestate. The difference between FDR and his Republican antagonists was far greater than the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats today. Today's Democrats have internalized and identified with the interests of those whom they should be actively mobilizing the population against. The Republocrats are now all of them heir to the fascist instincts inherent in the ruling elite. Republican elites manifest this in their policies as the party in power; Democratic elites evidence their unsavory class heritage by railing ritualistically against the Republicans even as they betray their fed-up constituencies by supporting the fundamental policies of their alleged "opponents". Effective opposition at the current historical juncture requires the only force capable of defeating the neoliberal and imperialist obsessions of the mainstream parties and their financial masters: street politics, the mobilization and eventual organization of the people against a ruling establishment seen by an increasing number of Americans as terminally corrupt and indifferent to their most pressing needs. Lest this popular disaffection be siphoned into an impotent and resigned cynicism, it would seem that intense educational efforts regarding the desirability and possibility of a third party, a genuine party of labor, become a priority for serious progressives. MoveOn must yield to MoveBeyond. As harder economic times threaten the not distant future, the economic stagnation and austerity that is fertile soil for the growth of fascist politics poses an unmistakably clear and present danger. Thinking and acting outside the political box has never been as pressing an imperative as it is now. Alan Nasser is professor emeritus of Political Economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia Wa. His articles have appeared in The Nation, Monthly Review, Commonweal, Common Dreams and a number of professional journals. That link worked for me :) |
That link worked for me :)
It did not work for me as it was mostly gibberish.. Is is impossable to have one's own thoughts? |
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probably more than we will ever know..
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I don't think it's such a weird idea. Sure the business and military are run by people, but not the average majority of the population. The working class. They are the ones I speak of. They are in the military out of idealistic reasons(mostly), and are in business(work) to make a living. The business and military folks are in it for power and money. Their reasons and goals are a world apart in my opinion.
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So you're saying that because entrepreneurs are just in it for the profit, they don't get any credit for all the jobs they create and all the taxes they pay.
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One needs to understand the bigger picture of what happened back then
What was happening with the Western economies post WW2 was of course going to be fairly complex arrangement of conditions that would shape the flow of money in following decades...as far as I can make out it has always been that the affluent and their workers are a symbiotic relationship that need each other to survive...
What drove the post WW2 western economy did vary but basically: Quote:
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they made lots of babies ,maybe one answer? Quote:
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That's not what I'm saying at all, Mazer. But the people who profit the most from war aren't the usual entrepreneurs. They are the usually the supremely wealthy and those in power, often one and the same. Like the movers and shakers in the military industrial complex. And not all entrepreneurs are just in it for the profit, for that matter. The point of disagreement is that the American people and American businesses are different, in my opinion. The main function of business is to earn a preofit for the most part. The main function of the people is to live and try to create a better life. (or something like that).
So you said the miltary industrial complex got us out of the depression and wars, and I say it's the blue collar workers who work for the military industrial complex and other businesses(of course) who got us out of those situation. Maybe I'm just arguing symantics here. So I see what you mean, because you include the worker in the overall picture of the military industrial complex and business. I separate the worker from the ruling class that actually runs the military industrial complex and alot of big conglomerate corporations. @ Albed Hard working americans usually get jobs, and don't give them. I don't see where, in that quote you gave from me, I said anything to give you the impression that I meant hard working americans give themselves jobs. But since you asked, some hard working americans are wise and frugal, and after a period of working for the man and saving up money, they can start their own business thus giving themselves a job. |
One of the biggest aspects of the great depression was unemployment; hard working americans without jobs.
It's hard to see just how those hard working americans without jobs ended the depression but you apparently can and I'd like you to explain. |
About 80% of americans were still working during the great depression. There wasn't an absolute lack of Jobs during the Depression. And there is very little growth in my country without the hard work of the laborer(or slaves earlier in US histroy). Just because government and corporations run the show, doesn't mean they can get anything done without the worker. Govenment and industry can create jobs, but who is gonna do them? So maybe you see it as FDR saved the country with the New Deal. But the Depression continued several more years after it was introduced. I think it was the fact that a majority of hard working americans continued to go to work and pay taxes and not panic.
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Please find me a link showing 80% of Americans still were working during the depression. I think you are master of the obvious here. No shit corporations and businesses need workers, and get this, workers need people willing to take the risk of starting businesses so they have jobs. They do go hand and hand don’t they???????
Bottom line, it was WWII, which got North America out of the depression. Why? Because after Pearl Harbor America went into “Total War” Millions of men enlisted into the Military which created jobs at home. There was a labor shortage in the USA and most of jobs were filled by women, blacks, and students. Did you know there was no cars built in the USA from 1942 until 1945? You know why? Because the assembly lines were building airplanes, tanks, ships, etc for the war. The United States built over 100 carriers of all types during the war, and over 100,000 aircraft. People were investing money into War Bonds, people had money, and the depression was over. The savings gave America a boom until the 80’s. That was when the USA went from the world’s largest creditor to the largest debtor. The United States emerged form the war as the supreme world power. In 1945, it possessed the largest navy in the world, a huge, technically advanced army, and enough money to bankroll the world's rebuilding through the Marshall Plan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan So Vern, Did WWII pull America out of the depression? Could the Military industrial complex exist without businesses and business owners? |
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Anyway here's a good little read analysing causes and effects of government actions relating to the great depression. Quote:
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Oh shit. What did I get myself into.
Yes, I am making class distinctions. It is just my commie indoctinated opinion that it all boils down to those that do the grunt work. So, Sinner, you could say that WW2 pulled America out of the depression, but I prefer to see WW2 and an unfortunate event that the american worker(some turned military) was able to handle even after they had suffered through most of the great depression. I think we are just splitting hairs here. Governments and politicians pass acts and make descisions high up on the hill. What I wanna know is who does the actual work. Now I'm not trying to say that running a country is an easy job. I just believe that the average worker is more important to the sucess of a nation in almost every endeavor. So you say the MIC(military industrial complex) carried us out of the depression and through the world war and the cold war after that. I say the American worker. Thats why I was trying to make a distinction between business and people. Of course there is a sort of sybiotic relationship there, but I think the worker would survive without business, but the business would not survive without the worker. All right. No need to fret. Now that I've thrown this thread way off topic, let's get back to the ruling elite fascists. Take it away, Albed. Oh yeah, Sinner. I got the 80% from the wiki on the great depression, but I may have mispoken. There were times during the depression that the number was less than 80%. I was reading the Wiki on the Recession of 1937, and that was where I got that figure. They actually said unemployment "jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938". I rounded up to 20% to get my 80% figure of employment. |
Some of the credit should be given to FDR
First New Deal, 1933–1934
Roosevelt's "First 100 Days" concentrated on the first part of his strategy: immediate relief. From March 9 to June 16, 1933, he sent Congress a record number of bills, all of which passed easily. To propose programs, Roosevelt relied on leading Senators such as George Norris, Robert F. Wagner and Hugo Black, as well as his own Brain Trust of academic advisers. Like Hoover, he saw the Depression as partly a matter of confidence, caused in part by people no longer spending or investing because they were afraid to do so. He therefore set out to restore confidence through a series of dramatic gestures. FDR's natural air of confidence and optimism did much to reassure the nation. His inauguration on March 4, 1933 occurred in the middle of a bank panic, hence the backdrop for his famous words: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."[16] The very next day he declared a "bank holiday" and announced a plan to allow banks to reopen. However, the number of banks that opened their doors after the "holiday" was less than the number that had been open before.[17] This was his first proposed step to recovery. Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother depicts destitute pea pickers during the depression in California, centering on Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of seven children, age 32, March 1936. Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother depicts destitute pea pickers during the depression in California, centering on Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of seven children, age 32, March 1936. * Relief measures included the continuation of Hoover's major relief program for the unemployed under the new name, Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The most popular of all New Deal agencies, and Roosevelt's favorite, was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which hired 250,000 unemployed young men to work on rural local projects. Congress also gave the Federal Trade Commission broad new regulatory powers and provided mortgage relief to millions of farmers and homeowners. Roosevelt expanded a Hoover agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, making it a major source of financing to railroads and industry. Roosevelt made agriculture relief a high priority and set up the first Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). The AAA tried to force higher prices for commodities by paying farmers to take land out of crops and to cut herds. * Reform of the economy was the goal of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933. It tried to end cutthroat competition by forcing industries to come up with codes that established the rules of operation for all firms within specific industries, such as minimum prices, agreements not to compete, and production restrictions. Industry leaders negotiated the codes which were then approved by NIRA officials. Industry needed to raise wages as a condition for approval. Provisions encouraged unions and suspended anti-trust laws. The NIRA was found to be unconstitutional by unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on May 27, 1935. Roosevelt opposed the decision, saying "The fundamental purposes and principles of the NIRA are sound. To abandon them is unthinkable. It would spell the return to industrial and labor chaos."[18] In 1933, major new banking regulations were passed. In 1934, the Securities and Exchange Commission was created to regulate Wall Street, with 1932 campaign fundraiser Joseph P. Kennedy in charge. * Recovery was pursued through "pump-priming" (that is, federal spending). The NIRA included $3.3 billion of spending through the Public Works Administration to stimulate the economy, which was to be handled by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Roosevelt worked with Republican Senator George Norris to create the largest government-owned industrial enterprise in American history, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which built dams and power stations, controlled floods, and modernized agriculture and home conditions in the poverty-stricken Tennessee Valley. The repeal of prohibition also brought in new tax revenues and helped him keep a major campaign promise. Roosevelt tried to keep his campaign promise by cutting the regular federal budget, including 40% cuts to veterans' benefits and cuts in overall military spending. He removed 500,000 veterans and widows from the pension rolls and slashed benefits for the remainder. Protests erupted, led by the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Roosevelt held his ground, but when the angry veterans formed a coalition with Senator Huey Long and passed a huge bonus bill over his veto, he was defeated. He succeeded in cutting federal salaries and the military and naval budgets. He reduced spending on research and education—there was no New Deal for science until World War II began. Roosevelt also kept his promise to push for repeal of Prohibition. In April 1933, he issued an Executive Order redefining 3.2% alcohol as the maximum allowed. That order was followed up by Congressional action in the drafting and passage of the 21st Amendment later that year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankli...3.E2.80.931934 Oh yeh ..the topic The two dozen crooks that tried to pull off this coup against FDR were allowed to freely devise the corrupt system of government that run the country now. Quote:
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Maybe you should all read,
"The ragged trousered philanthropist" Then decide on a point of view. |
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so are you saying it didn't happen then ?
I think you might be the one that is deluded fucking idiot... you think you can just pass that off as some sort of statment... get you head outa ya arse ya fool :f: |
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Go to a psychiatrist multi and show him all the stupid conspiracy bullshit you're so fond of rolling in like a pig in muck and if he's compentent he'll diagnose you as a classic paranoid schizophrenic.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/par...hrenia/DS00862 Quote:
If you're really interested in learning the truth about something you'll go to websites from reputable organizations and universities instead of the stupid crackpots you get your bullshit from. But I don't think you're interested in the truth. |
"If you're really interested in learning the truth about something you'll go to websites from reputable organizations"
+ "The shocking results of the investigation were promptly scotched and stashed in the National Archives." (reputable organization, national archives) "instead of the stupid crackpots you get your bullshit from." + "Columbia Law School professor" "Columbia Law School professor,stupid crackpots) stupid crackpots = national archives "Go to a psychiatrist multi " "if he's compentent he'll diagnose you as a classic paranoid schizophrenic." Multi = paranoid schizophrenic. Ohh look it all adds up:sarc: |
Thanks for pointing that out..
Albed is so fucking brainwashed
he thinks people will believe his bullshit if he repeats it often enough. I will have you know My last psychiatric assessment clearly stated 'no visible signs of psychosis' :D BBC documentaries usually have some truth to them when they have historical documents ..etc I must have look and see if this The Plot Against America show is available online by the way paranoid schizophrenics love avoiding questions like : "so are you saying it didn't happen then ?" so Albed did it not really happen at all? |
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thanks man
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That spoils everything. :AP: |
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hehe |
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