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Quote of the Day: Corporatism
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” ― Benito Mussolini
If anyone doubts the US is becoming increasingly fascistic, this quote – from an expert on fascism – should serve to remove those doubts. The main difference between communism and fascism is that in communism the government enforces its will directly, while in fascism, the government subcontracts enforcement to pliant corporations. The corporate wokeness blooming like thriving poison ivy over the last year shows how they are cooperating with the authoritarians within the Federal government to strip both individual citizens and state and local governments of both autonomy and of the traditional liberties they had previously enjoyed.
The good news is we are still at a point where we can push back on corporate actions. And push back we should – hard. For example, MLB has moved the All-Star Game from Georgia due to a law the state legislature passed requiring voters to identify themselves. The response from the Georgia Legislature should be to pass a law stating that any corporation or individual who institutes an economic boycott of Georgia because of a law requiring voter identification may not demand personal identification from customers doing business with them. Make them live by their own rules.
Published in Politics
I was pleased to see that a Georgia state representative has introduced a bill to make Georgia’s election laws the same as those in Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware–because the Delaware laws are considerably more restrictive than those recently enacted in GA.
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It’s all the same result in the end. Millions dead.
A friend on FB cited this quote, and got in response an analysis of what Mussolini actually said. It appears that he was not writing about modern commercial corporations but about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds.
Stuff he did say:
“The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State–a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values–interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.”
and
“The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.”
So labor unions, for example, would be subordinate to Mussolini’s all-encompassing State. That State is to be neither an aggregation of individuals nor an aggregation of territorrially-defiined sub-states, but rather an aggregate of organizations, organized hierarchically. https://www.politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corporate-state?fbclid=IwAR2Tzi6KEqah3WsAxN_d1-EMyoE9U4ghbXemGtTSMk_AESKBjXw9j3xYFvo
So true.
When I see Antifa (Anti-fascists) acting as a violent left-wing group, I wonder if any of them in that group have stopped to scratch their heads about that dichotomy.
Left-wing anti-fascists agitating for socialism? Does that make sense to anybody?
What a bunch of idiots.
It’s not that they don’t understand opposing points of view. It’s that they don’t understand their own point of view.
Embarrassing.
Which is really a good working definition of MLB, the NCAA, or the FANG corporations, if you think about it. In function if not perfectly aligned in form.
Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act proposal was explicitly fascist. It required all major corporations to acquire a federal charter to operate and gave the employees a lot of control over the board. This is exactly what Mussolini intended with his corporatist program. It should not surprise us: the Democrats have always loved fascism.
The United States has had a state capitalism problem since the Pendleton Act was passed, and the problems have only snowballed since the progressive era.
We only had a truly free-market economy for the first 100 years, with a few hiccups of freedom here and there.
Obama favors a corporatist (fascist) State. Consider this passage from The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, by Edward Klein:
During his dinner with the historians, Obama indicated that he had a preference for a corporatist political system in which the economy would be collectively managed by big employers, big unions, and government officials through a formal mechanism at the national level. Also known as state capitalism, it is a system in which the government picks winners and promotes economic growth.
This corporatist approach was hardly a new idea. It had been around for more than one hundred and fifty years. It had been tried in the 1930s and 1940s by Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascists, and in Europe after World War II by democratic-socialist governments in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, among others. In America during the1970s and 1980s, leftwing Democratic presidential candidates Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis revived the idea, arguing that America should replace free-market capitalism with what they called “a neo-corporatist state.”
Though the corporatist idea had an unbroken record of failure both in Europe and America, where voters had decisively rejected Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis, Obama was determined to embrace this discredited economic, political, and social philosophy. He planned to achieve his “transformational” presidency by vastly expanding the reach of Washington into the everyday life of American citizens.
(quote to be continued)
(quote continued)
In that regard, the American president whom Obama most closely resembled was not JFK, Reagan, Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. It was Woodrow Wilson, whose conception of himself was aptly described by the noted conservative historian Forrest McDonald (also missing at the White House dinner) as “little short of messianic. “Indeed, McDonald wrote about Wilson:
Forrest McDonald’s description of Woodrow Wilson captures Barack Obama to a T.
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This is what the Democratic Party has largely become–although some Democrats prefer communism.
Failure is qualifying, rather than disqualifying, for a leftist.
Because although it is failure for ordinary people, it is success for leftists and other malevolent creatures.
Woodrow Wilson did not have a high opinion of the US Constitution, specifically, he thought Separation of Powers was ridiculous. He argued that no organism would ever be created to have some of its organs oppose each other.
So he didn’t understand the concept of Homeostasis in biological organisms…which I believe was indeed known at the time…or the concept of feedback in mechanical systems, or the separation of functions in organizations, such as the distinction between authorizing payments and making them.
I agree with you a lot, Seawriter, but you think this corporate wokism is something that came about in the last year? TV commercials, the direct word of the sponsors, and the programs they support through at least tacit agreement, have been woke for 20 years. One of my hobby horses for a long time has been tv commercials. If you were a Martian looking in on our commercials for the last 20 years, you’d assume that the US was 70% POC. that every idiot to be found was white and male, that every act of kindness or volunteerism, every wise decision or insight came from those POC. All doctors, engineers, business owners and experts of any kind are POC or pale women in advertisements.
This has been coming for a while, They’ve been signaling for at least a decade. If you didn’t see this coming, you just do not watch much TV.
They’ve just become a degree or two more explicit.
I have always seen this as in the same vein as communist countries calling themselves “peoples republics”, being neither based upon people’s popular consent or organized as a republic. But they knew that the label would work for their dictatorships, as it has for Antifa, because of the useful idiots out there in abundance. Like that guy on CNN…
In Mussolini’s vision, the CEOs duty is to the state and not stockholders. The corporation is just a cog in the machinery of both production and governance. Workers demanding changes? Let the state tell them to knock it off. Consumers unhappy? No competitors can enter the market while the favored enterprise is still favored.
Much of the same perks of power as in a communist system but without having to indulge the tiresome fiction that the management class was materially and socially equal to the workers. It won’t matter whether increasingly lousy electric cars are made by GM or the Department of Transportation–same people will be at the top, distinctions between government bureaucracy and corporate bureaucracy will blur.
Back when I was a lobbyist, lots of CEOs wrote checks to incumbent Democrats as Congress openly declared itself a protection racket under Jim Wright/Tony Coehlo & George Mitchell. Nice little depreciation allowance/grandfather clause/tax break/regulatory exemption you’ve got there…. be a real shame if something were to happen to it… Surrendering lots of control in exchange for pain relief and survival is easy to envision.
I always wondered how much of that goes on.
And how open and blatant it is. Cash changing hands in back alleys? Or checks written on the business account, and listed on taxes as a business expense?
It still goes on (of course.) Peter Schweizer has written extensively on this.
The CEO and his company lobbyist are expected to write personal checks to the campaign fund of the
blackmailerrequesting member (usually a senior member–no backbench twerp can make that kind of threat/guarantee) and also write checks for other members with the annotation that these campaign contributions were made at the behest of theblackmailerrequestor so as to enhance his influence with them. ThemarkvictimCEO was also expected to gather friends and colleagues (especially if the victim is a leader in a trade association) and have them do the same if the vulnerable legislative issue imperils them all. It is illegal for companies to reimburse this stuff but the salary and expense budget for some lobbyists back in the day were large in the expectation this would be required.People think campaign reform is about keeping these shady business types from influencing Congress (just like all those small businessmen and shopkeepers who control the Mafia with their weekly payments). Business executives generally love limits on campaign finance. Usually, campaign finance “reform” is about ways to limit contributions to the GOP while allowing leftist groups to run wild.
This is an excellent discussion.
Between this, and the way financial markets and the Fed really work, it’s like civic involvement is a total waste of time.
Which explains a large fraction of the left’s demonization of business and glorification of government. (And note the leftists such as Michael Moore who openly malign small business people as being the ones most deserving of destruction.)
The Left does not understand the principle of limited government–that power must be constrained because individuals will abuse it.
There is no limiting principle on the left. They will keep going towards communism without stopping. On the right, it’s limited by anarchism.
The government should stick to actual “public goods” and Medicare and Social Security. The Federal Reserve should not push the economy around.
Exactly.