{"id":178793,"date":"2021-02-08T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2021-02-08T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=178793"},"modified":"2021-02-23T11:01:15","modified_gmt":"2021-02-23T11:01:15","slug":"creeping-corporate-statism-aka-fascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/02\/creeping-corporate-statism-aka-fascism\/","title":{"rendered":"Creeping Corporate Statism, aka Fascism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

3 Feb 2021 – <\/em>Despite depending on separate news media that purvey different realities, the two corporate parties both serve a corporate dictatorship.<\/p>\n

When I look back to the beginning of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency, four light years ago, the first image that comes to mind is that of Jimmy Dore\u2019s\u00a0conversation <\/a>\u00a0with Glenn Greenwald about Congressmember Adam Schiff\u2019s appearance on\u00a0The Tucker Carlson<\/em>\u00a0show. Schiff is a Democrat representing California\u2019s 28th District, and\u00a0the military industrial complex <\/a>. Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon are among his most generous campaign contributors. He voted\u00a0against <\/a>\u00a0banning armed forces in Libya without congressional approval, voted\u00a0against <\/a>\u00a0removing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, voted in\u00a0favor <\/a>\u00a0of the Iraq War, voted in\u00a0favor <\/a>\u00a0of arming moderate Syrian opposition rebels, and\u00a0pushed <\/a>\u00a0for the US to arm Ukrainian rebels.<\/p>\n

\u201cRalph Nader\u2019s 2014 book includes a far better definition of fascism than I\u2019ve heard from anyone in the anti-Trump army these past four years.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Greenwald told Dore that Kyle Kulinski had recommended Dore\u2019s\u00a0video <\/a>\u00a0\u201cTucker Carlson SHREDS Adam Schiff on Russian Election Hack,\u201d and it was one of the funniest things he\u2019d ever seen, so he\u2019d be happy to appear on the Jimmy Dore Show any time. It was the beginning of a collaboration that keeps getting better, and the video that started it all is aging like a fine wine.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s an excerpt of Dore\u2019s commentary while playing the Tucker Carlson segment in which Schiff was insisting that Russians engineered Wikileaks\u2019 release of the DNC and Podesta emails. Dore intervened right after Schiff told Carlson that Ronald Reagan would be rolling over in his grave to hear him carrying water for the Kremlin:<\/p>\n

Jimmy Dore:<\/strong>\u00a0A journalist [Tucker Carlson] asked him [Adam Schiff] to reveal his sources and to say something. \u201cI want you to say that you know this for sure.\u201d He won’t say it. And what is his defense? His defense is the Hillary Clinton\u2019s defense: \u201cYou’re a commie. You’re a commie. You’re a commie.\u201d That’s what they’re fucking doing. These are Democrats! \u00a0 . . . .<\/p>\n

So do you see how shitty Republican the Democrats have become? They\u2019re now the redbaiters. . . He’s on Fox News red baiting a Fox News host who actually has it right this time. That’s how shitty the Democrats have become. They\u2019ve made Tucker Carlson look good. That’s how shitty they are.<\/p>\n

Comedian Dave Ryan:<\/strong>\u00a0That is not easy.<\/p>\n

Jimmy Dore:<\/strong>\u00a0They’re making him look like fuckin\u2019 Walter Cronkite. Tucker Carlson!<\/p>\n

Adam Schiff to Tucker Carlson:<\/strong>\u00a0You\u2019re gonna have to move your show to RT, Russian television.<\/p>\n

Jimmy Dore:<\/strong>\u00a0Can he not stop it? This is your defense? \u201cYou’re gonna have to go work for Russia?\u201d This is disgusting. These are Democrats doing this. This is gross. It doesn’t help them get elected. It hurts them. This is hurting the Democrats. It doesn’t help. This is 100% distraction from what the problem is in this goddamn country.<\/p>\n

To Jimmy Dore\u2019s credit, he acknowledged having once performed at a fundraiser for Adam Schiff, and Dave Ryan admitted to having made that mistake more than once. Both were no doubt spooked by whatever ghoulish Republicans LA County spit up to run against Schiff, but they swore they\u2019d never do it again. Greenwald, in one of his many reappearances on The Jimmy Dore Show, acknowledged that he\u2019d once thought the Democrats were just kind of wishy-washy and spineless, but now he realizes they\u2019re hopelessly corrupt. I hope it\u2019s more than a tiny percentage of the tiny left fringe who had come along with them by the time Hillary, on her podcast with Nancy Pelosi, alleged that Trump was on the phone with Vladimir Putin during the Capitol Riot.<\/p>\n

(And, not to be self-righteous, I should admit I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, and, like Jimmy Dore, climbed aboard the Bernie Sanders train again this year, only to be open-mouthed when he dropped out after Obama\u2019s Super Tuesday engineering on behalf of Joe Biden.)<\/p>\n

Fascism<\/strong><\/p>\n

As soon as Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Democrats whipped up \u201cThe Resistance,\u201d taking the name of movements that resisted within Nazi and Italian fascist-occupied Europe. Pacifica\u2019s KPFA Radio began airing a \u201cResist, resist, resist\u201d jingle, and on June 27, 2017, Pacifica Radio aired a 15-hour marathon broadcast of George Orwell\u2019s novel \u201c1984\u201d for the first time since the original broadcast in 1975. That was just an early instance of Trump Derangement Syndrome and NeoMcCarthyism that\u00a0consumed<\/a>\u00a0much of Pacifica and the rest of the left-of-center for the past four years.<\/p>\n

There was much talk of impending fascism, but it wasn\u2019t clear just what that was supposed to mean, and the frenzy about Trump\u2019s white supremacist intolerance became hugely intolerant in itself. I\u2019ve started keeping a list of dissidents, left and right, who\u2019ve been suspended from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms. As Glenn Greenwald said, in an\u00a0interview <\/a>\u00a0with Unherd, \u201cIt\u2019s Kafkaesque, and to call it that is almost to minimize how repressive it is.\u201d There\u2019s no one to appeal to but some anonymous Big Brother-Big Tech authority, and if they don\u2019t give you an answer, tough luck.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve started keeping a list of dissidents, left and right, who\u2019ve been suspended from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Last week YouTube\u00a0disappeared <\/a>\u00a0all 24 hours of an academic conference on academic censorship produced by Project Censored, with no explanation. When queried by Mint Press News writer Alan McCleod, Google responded that they had no record of its existence.<\/p>\n

Ralph Nader\u2019s 2014 book \u201cUnstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State <\/a>\u201d may have been overly optimistic, but it includes a far better definition of fascism than I\u2019ve heard from anyone in the anti-Trump army these past four years:<\/p>\n

“Corporatism,\u201d or “corporate statism,” as Grover Norquist calls it, is first and foremost a doctrine of corporate supremacy. Whatever advances that system of power and status over the constitutionally affirmed sovereignty of the people comprises the widening, all-encompassing corporatist agenda. As befits the ever-concentrating command of ever more mobile capital, labor, and technology\u2014as well as its own media\u2014the corporations\u2019 dynamic of expanding control with ever more immunity knows no self-imposed limitations. Large corporations usually push, with whatever political, technological, economic, marketing, and cultural tools are required, the frontiers of domination in all directions. Wielding the tools to advance their agenda is an army of diverse experts and operators bound together by common economic interests within the authoritarian hierarchy of the modern global corporation. However you might describe them, it is hard to deny that their DNA commands them to control, undermine, or eliminate any force, tradition, or institution that impedes their expansion of sales, profits, and executive compensation. That is what their extensive strategic planning is all about. What they want is maximum predictability and the most feasible control of outcomes, with government being the preferred servicing or enforcement tool.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe corporations\u2019 dynamic of expanding control with ever more immunity knows no self-imposed limitations.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThat is what is meant by corporate statism. And as it gets stronger, it delivers a weaker economy for a majority of Americans, a weaker democratic society, and record riches for the few. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though hailing from the patrician class, put his finger on the dangers of corporatism. He wasn\u2019t charitable in his message to Congress in 1938, successfully calling for the creation of a Temporary National Economic Commission (TNEC) to examine the concentration of corporate power. He averred that ‘the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than [the] democratic state in its essence is fascism.’ Though World War II\u2019s Axis powers gave the word a more lethal meaning, Roosevelt was equating fascism with the corporate state, uniting corporate influence with, over, and inside the government at state and national levels.\u201d<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize<\/em> for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at @AnnGarrison<\/em>, ann@kpfa.org,<\/em><\/a> ann@anngarrison.com.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 blackagendareport.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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