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Hi. I’m sorry to my regular readers for not writing any articles in the last couple of days; I’ve just been staring transfixed at the fallout from the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the words which normally come bubbling up on their own just haven’t been there for me.

Bolsonaro is a fascist. I mean that in a very real, literal and non-alarmist way. I’ve seen a lot of conservatives in both the US and Australia defending him as just another right wing nationalist like Donald Trump, which is partly due to the fact that he has been straightforwardly labeled the “Trump of the tropics” and the “Brazilian Donald Trump” by the English-speaking mass media, and partly due to the fact that the political left has been warning of the danger Bolsonaro poses using the exact same language they used to warn about Trump.

So in a way it’s understandable that the two men would be lumped into the same group in public perception. The right (the MAGA hat-wearing “Build the wall” right, not the tiki torch-waving “Pinochet did nothing wrong” right) would probably mostly object to Trump calling for a civil war in America in which tens of thousands of Americans would be rounded up and murdered, advocating the physical assault of homosexuals in the street, openly proclaiming that he wants America to be a dictatorship etc, but these are all things Bolsonaro has publicly spoken in favor of. But because they’ve been hearing him described using the exact same labels and dire warnings that were hyperbolically applied to Donald Trump, who minus the rhetoric and hysteria has turned out to be a fairly conventional Republican president, conservatives assume Bolsonaro is fine. All the most severe linguistic tools were used up against Trump, so there were none left in the toolbox for Bolsonaro.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Avoid the Slippery Slope

October 27, 2018

Avoid the Slippery Slope

Everything government touches turns to crap.
Ringo Starr

Social media companies, search engines, and payments platforms are excising conservative, libertarian, and assorted anti-government voices. SLL argued in “The Friendly Faces of Fascism” that the largest and best known of these companies were essentially arms of the government. They are mechanisms for conveying information, opinions, and commerce between billions of people. Given their reach, importance, and ties to the government, should these ostensibly private companies be subject to the First Amendment’s prohibition of government restriction of free speech and the free press?

The First Amendment states that: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. By its terms, the amendment applies to one institution, Congress. By necessary implication, freedom of speech and the press must also be the freedom to choose what not to speak or publish.

In Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980), the Supreme Court held that California’s Constitution permissibly required a private shopping center to allow a group to express its political views on shopping center property regularly held open to the public. California’s Constitution created an affirmative right of free speech that the court reasoned went beyond the First Amendment, which is a set of prohibitions on the government, or negative rights.

Those who argue that the social media companies, search engines, and payments platforms shouldn’t be allowed to suppress viewpoints they don’t like hang their rhetorical hats on the Pruneyard rationale. These companies are virtual public forums or enable such forums, the argument goes. As such, they should be required to accept all viewpoints.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the U.S. in a Pre-Fascist Period?

September 28, 2018

Is the U.S. in a Pre-Fascist Period?

Photo Source Eden, Janine and Jim | CC BY 2.0

Since Pres. Donald Trump’s election, a variety of well-intentioned commentators have raised a chorus of concern that the U.S. was entering – or is in – a per-fascist period. If so, what is to be done? If not, what does the Trump presidency – and the conservative, religious right and corporatists who back him – signify in terms of the coming of “fascism” to American?

The radical filmmaker – and media showman – Michael Moore is among the latest to warn about the emergence of a pre-fascist state. As part of efforts to promote his latest film, Fahrenheit 11/9, he has appeared on Democracy Now!, various MSNBC shows and other outlets often quoting from Bertram Gross’s 1980 book, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (1980): “The next wave of fascism will come not with cattle cars and camps. It will come with a friendly face.”

Overlooked by Moore, Gross was revising William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (1960), more ominous quote: “Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.”

Moore’s concern is shared by Madeleine Albright, Pres. Clinton’s secretary of state, Democratic Party stalwart, faithful Hillary Clinton backer and, as a Czechoslovakian child, survived the early German occupation. In Fascism: A Warning, she notes, “Every age has its own fascism.” Drawing a wider, more global, picture than Moore, she sees fascist tendencies on the rise in governments in Russia,the Philippines, Hungary and Poland as well as Egypt, North Korea, Turkey and Venezuela. With regards to the U.S., she is caution, noting that Pres. Trump is not a fascist but “the most anti-democratic leader that I have studied in American history.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Crisis After Crisis: 10 Years After the Crash, There’s No ‘Reforming’ Global Capitalism

September 21, 2018

Crisis After Crisis: 10 Years After the Crash, There’s No ‘Reforming’ Global Capitalism

The real battle is now between two post-globalization camps: democratic socialists… and fascists.

global-financial-crisis-capitalism-globalization-finance

Shutterstock

It is now clear that financial crises are not discrete events but are linked phenomena that have been unleashed on the globe ever since the financial markets were liberalized during the Reagan-Thatcher era in the early 1980s.

To take just the three most prominent crashes, surplus capital that could not find profitable domestic outlets after the Japanese bubble burst in the late 1980s found its way as speculative capital into Southeast Asia, where it contributed to the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98. The Asian crisis, in turn, helped generate Wall Street’s implosion in 2008, owing to the Asian countries’ channeling the financial reserves they had accumulated to protect them from a repeat of 1997 into the United States — where they helped fuel the subprime real estate boom.

The turbulence that hit global stock markets last February, causing much fright and a paper loss of 4 billion dollars, was a reminder that the next big implosion may be just around the corner. A just concluded study by the Transnational Institute reveals that in 10 critical areas where major reform is needed, few to no measures have been taken to prevent a recurrence of 2007. These areas range from shadow banking to fractional reserve banking to international financial governance to central bank accountability.

Skating on Thin Ice Once More

So, not surprisingly, current indicators show that the world again is skating on thin ice.

First, the “too big to fail” problem has become worse. The big banks that were rescued by the U.S. government in 2008 because they were seen as too big to fail have become even more too big to fail, with the “Big Six” U.S. banks — JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley — collectively having 43 percent more deposits, 84 percent more assets, and triple the amount of cash they held before the 2008 crisis.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

American Fascism

September 17, 2018

American Fascism

Photo Source Alan Turkus | CC BY 2.0

From Whence ‘We’ Came

Fascism is a loaded topic for Americans. The term is usually put forward as oppositional, as the flip side of representative democracy, e.g. authoritarian. Left unaddressed is whose interests’ American representative democracy represents. Twenty years of research by political scientist Thomas Ferguson strongly supports the conclusion that it is monied interests (a/k/a the rich) that determines public policy. And while this isn’t the authoritarian leader alluded to with the charge of fascism, neither does it contrast with it in the sense implied.

In the American iconography, slavery and genocide against the indigenous population took place from the so-called founding forward under this system of representative democracy. Phrased differently, there is nothing intrinsic to representative democracy that precludes slavery and genocide. The social, economic and political repression and exploitation they represented had economic taking as their motive and they were systemic in structure— no single authoritarian leader, no Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, created them as social facts.

The way that slavery and genocide functioned as American institutions was through oppositional definitions of the polity and not-polity. The assignation of slaves as three-fifths a human being in the Constitution was to accrue political representation to slave owners, not partial representation to slaves. Any geographic definition of the polity would have included slaves and some proportion of the indigenous population. One can argue the details of ‘the progress of history,’ but from the founding to the present, with ‘restorative’ interregnums, American representative democracy has meant class rule.

The class relations of American political economy are antithetical to the notion of a unified public interest. The point isn’t to suggest that this or that authoritarian leader isn’t authoritarian, but rather to sketch in the political backdrop to argue that the lived experience of social, economic and political repression is lived experience, not academic theories or bourgeois fantasies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Stripping Away Local Governmental Powers: a Global Rising Tide of Fascism

July 18, 2018

Stripping Away Local Governmental Powers: a Global Rising Tide of Fascism

Fascists love strong central government control. On the other hand, local autonomy represents good governance, something that is anathema to fascists. Today, around the world, local governments at the municipal, provincial, and regional levels are finding themselves under siege by central governments exercising what can only be described as fascist grabs for unitary executive power.

Among the countries where local governmental political, judicial, and financial authority has been under attack, severely limited, or completely abolished are Australia, Antigua and Barbuda, Turkey, Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States.

The Trump administration has threatened US municipal and state governments over everything from providing sanctuary to asylum-seeking immigrants, to cracking down on legalized cannabis, and moving to emaciate pubic health care and insurance services. When it comes to state’s rights, the Trump administration only supports them when they restrict a woman’s right to seek an abortion, codify institutionalized racism, and permit even the mentally-ill to own weapons. Moreover, the Trump administration has singled out for scathing personal attacks, mayors and city leaders in New York; Chicago; Philadelphia; New Orleans; Boston; Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland, California; Denver; Pontiac, Michigan; Charlottesville, Virginia; and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The only reason Trump lashed out the mayors is because they are Democrats and critics of wide-ranging Trump policies.

The Trump administration is also infringing on Native American tribal rights enshrined in legal international treaties signed between past US presidents and tribal chiefs. For Trump, Native American lands are ripe for exploitation of their natural resources. Trump, who owned casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, blames the failure of his casinos, in part, on the opening of casinos on semi-sovereign tribal reservations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New California Bill Would ELIMINATE Free Speech, Require ‘Online Fact Checkers’

April 11, 2018

New California Bill Would ELIMINATE Free Speech, Require ‘Online Fact Checkers’

California Senator Richard Pan, the infamous fascist who forced a mandatory vaccination law through in order to rake in money from big pharma, has decided there should no longer be free speech for anyone other than the government. Pan’s new bill proposes to require “online fact checkers” to verify content before anything can be posted on the internet.

Anyone who has ever said tyranny cannot come to America has been proven wrong. Pan’s new bill would basically outlaw questioning the government’s official narrative, and is reminiscent of the book burning days of Nazi Germany. The bill supposedly only targets social media in California, but as Jon Rappaport points out, once you read the bill, it applies to the whole of the internet.

This isn’t some sort of prank either. The leftists in power are getting desperate in their attempt to control information and produce propaganda and this is just more evidence of such. We experienced evidence of this yesterday when SHTFPlanreported that the Department of Homeland Security has been instructed to compile a database of all journalists and online “media influencers.”

But that’s all beginning now, here, in the “land of the free.” Last week, SHTFPlan interviewed Sarah Leach who was detained without charges for survivalist posts on her own Facebook page. But we are expected to believe that DHS has no nefarious reasoning for compiling a list of all journalists, bloggers, podcasters, or as they like to call them: “media influencers”?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump Seeks Congressional Funding for 60,000-Man Army to Overthrow Assad

March 9, 2018

Trump Seeks Congressional Funding for 60,000-Man Army to Overthrow Assad

ISIS, or ISIL, or Islamic State, has been almost completely defeated in Syria, but the U.S. Department of Defense is requesting an increase instead of a decrease in funding to support “Vetted Syrian Opposition,” or fighters in Syria against Syria’s Government, and it refers to these fighters as being part of America’s “strategy to defeat ISIS,” instead of as being what they now obviously are: fighters for regime-change, or to overthrow Syria’s Government (which is headed by its President Bashar al-Assad, who received 89% of the votes cast throughout Syria in the internationally monitored 2014 Presidential election).

The Trump Administration’s “Department of Defense Budget Fiscal Year (FY) 2019” funding-request to Congress calls for “III. Requirements in Syria” of:

a Coalition campaign to degrade, dismantle, and ultimately defeat ISIS in Syria. One key element of DoD’s strategy to defeat ISIS is to train, equip, sustain, and enable elements of the Vetted Syrian Opposition (VSO) eligible for support under current law. By the end of FY 2018, these forces are projected to total approximately 60,000 to 65,000; 30,000 to conduct ongoing combat missions against ISIS in the MERV, and 35,000 Internal Security Forces in liberated areas (to provide approximately 20 police/security forces for every 1,000 civilians).

Here is the:

SUMMARY

The FY 2019 request fully funds the Syria T[rain]&E[quip/arm] program based on requirements to sustain a 35,000 Internal Security Force together with a 30,000 combat personnel partner forces (as required) to liberate, secure, and defend territory previously controlled by ISIS [but now no longer ISIS-controlled]. The following is a summary of the requirements in Syria by category:

Category FY 2018 Request FY 2019 Request ($ in Millions) [FY2018, then FY2019]

Weapons, Ammunition, Vehicles and Other Equipment $393.3 $162.5

Basic Life Support $6.1 $8.0

Transportation and Staging $40.0 $28.0

Operational Sustainment $60.6 $101.5

TOTAL $500.0 $300.0

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Prepare for War: Globalism, Socialism, and Communism vs. Freedom

March 6, 2018

Prepare for War: Globalism, Socialism, and Communism vs. Freedom

“Peace Sells, But Who’s Buying?” – Megadeath

“SI VIS PACEM PARA BELLVM.” (If you wish peace, prepare for war) PVBLIVS FLAVIVS VEGETIVS RENATVS (aka: “Vegetius”)

“Peace through superior firepower.” – former President Ronald Reagan

***

History: It repeats itself and is consistently ignored before it does so. Ignored are the elements that lead up to the repeated event, although they blossom akin to flowers right before the eyes. One of the problems is doubting it, the “doubting” that the event is happening…is really happening. One of the elements that leads to that doubt is the event transpires almost imperceptibly, with such incremental slowness that it is not recognized as a single event that is happening.

In this case we are talking about the conversion of our society in the United States to full-blown dictatorship or a complete loss of rights guaranteed under the Constitution…such a loss that eventually leads to a dictatorship or a tyrannical, oppressive government. History shows us, and we ignore it.

The Founding Fathers have been degraded and ridiculed by the new society the media and their Communist masters are creating. Their mortal weaknesses are upheld at every chance in substitution for the enormity of the sacrifices they made to form the basis for our nation’s government. The Constitution of the United States of America took more than 11 years to create.

These Communists would have you believe that the Founding Fathers were a pack of illiterate morons who could not control their own lascivious appetites…who owned slaves and were elitists. These Communists have been infiltrating the United States for a hundred years…destroying the moral fabric of our society by destroying the family. The Communists infiltrated our government and camouflaged themselves with the names “Liberal” or “Progressive,” or some (such as Bernie Sanders) declaring softly, “I’m a Socialist.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

An Introduction to Political Economy

December 21, 2017

An Introduction to Political Economy

Last month, when I looked across the vast gray wasteland of the calendar page ahead and noted that there were five Wednesdays in November, I asked readers—in keeping with a newly minted but entertaining tradition here on Ecosophia—to suggest a theme for the fifth Wednesday post. This blog being the eccentric phenomenon that it is, it probably shouldn’t have surprised me that the result was a neck-and-neck contest between a post on nature spirits and a post on alternatives to capitalism and socialism, with a focus on democratic syndicalism. Nature spirits won by a nose, but there was enough interest in the other option that I decided to go ahead and write a post on that as well.

Nature spirits and democratic syndicalism may not seem to have much in common, but I’ve discovered one unexpected similarity: it’s very difficult to discuss either one in a single post. To make any kind of sense out of the ancient belief that the forces of nature are best understood and most truly experienced as persons rather than things, it turned out to be necessary to delve into the entire tangled mess our culture has made about the concept of personhood, and what does and doesn’t count as a person. Only when that was cleared away could we go on and talk about what it means to experience nature as composed of persons rather than things.

In the same way, if we’re going to make any kind of sense of the alternatives to capitalism and socialism, it’s going to be necessary to talk for a while about capitalism, socialism, and the third and usually unmentionable system of modern industrial economics—yes, that would be fascism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump Continues Obama’s Wars Against Democracy

December 10, 2017

Trump Continues Obama’s Wars Against Democracy

US President Trump’s bold support for the apartheid dictatorship of Israel against that theocratic-racist nation’s non-Jews, fits into a larger picture of the supremacist nation that America itself has increasingly become. His immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, had repeatedly referred to the United States as being the only indispensable nation — that all others are “dispensable” — such as when President Obama addressed America’s future military leaders, at West Point, on 28 May 2014, by telling them:

The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

He was telling the military that America’s economic competition, against the BRICS nations, is a key matter for America’s military, and not only for America’s private corporations; that US taxpayers fund America’s military at least partially in order to impose the wills and extend the wealth of the stockholders in America’s corporations abroad; and that the countries against which America is in economic competition are “dispensable” but America “is and remains the one indispensable nation.” This, supposedly, also authorizes America’s weapons and troops to fight against countries whose “governments seek a greater say in global forums.” In other words: Stop the growing economies from growing faster than America’s. There is another name for the American Government’s supremacist ideology. This term is “fascism.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10½ blog posts. 10. The current impasse

November 28, 2017

The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10½ blog posts. 10. The current impasse

I’ve just returned from a short but fascinating meeting in Nicaragua on small-scale farming, which I plan to write about soon. But first I want to finish my history of the world. Apologies if the latter has dragged on too much, but we’re in the home straight now, and we’ll be moving on to other stuff soon. As ever a fully referenced version of this essay is here.

oOo

By the end of World War II, of the four key modern political doctrines I identified above it was liberal-democratic capitalism and communism that were left standing. Agrarian populism had its moments in post-war decolonisation, while fascism has recurred here and there, usually in diluted forms after the image problem it acquired during World War II. But essentially the end of that war marked the start of the capitalist-communist Cold War death battle, with the USA taking over from Britain in the driving seat of global capitalism and enforcing a global and far from peaceful Pax Americana, which has gradually lost its proselytizing zeal in favour of narrower self-interest.

The capitalist west’s answer to the threat of communism – other than naked military power – was a Keynesian settlement between capital and labour, in which the working class was offered full (male – and then, increasingly, female) employment and rising prosperity in return for political docility. This was quite easily achieved in the thirty years after World War II – the ‘trente glorieuses’ – with prodigious economic growth keeping both the owners of capital and the owners of labour happy. There were a few dissonant voices – environmentalists arguing that the cost of economic growth was ecological damage and the drawdown of non-renewable resources, prophets foretelling the impossibility of endless compound growth, and malcontents bemoaning the absurdity and ennui of a hyper-materialist modernity, but they gained limited traction at best.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Europe Will Reap What Spain Has Sown

October 30, 2017

Europe Will Reap What Spain Has Sown

The Spanish government decided to reach back into its history and borrow from the playbook of longtime Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco in dealing with Catalonia’s decision to declare independence from the Spanish Kingdom as the Republic of Catalonia. The Catalan government’s decision to declare independence followed an October 1 referendum in the region that resulted in a “yes” for independence.

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, whose Popular Party is a direct political descendant of Franco’s fascist Falangist Party, wasted no time in invoking, for the first time, Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution, which allows the Spanish Kingdom to impose direct rule on regions not adhering to the whiplashing from Madrid. Catalonia is the first, but possible not the last victim, of Spain’s neo-fascism on display for the entire world.

During the Spanish Civil War, the Catalans and Basques fought with bravery on behalf of the Spanish Second Republic against the fascist forces of Franco and his fascists. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini provided all-out support for Franco, much like the European Union, NATO, and the United States have fully backed Rajoy in his confrontation with Catalonia. Spain’s King Felipe VI October 3 speech, in which he condemned the Catalan referendum’s pro-independence results, was seen by many Catalans, as well as other groups like the Basques, Galicians, and Andalusians, as an unnecessary involvement in politics. Not only Catalans, but others across Spain, began calling for the scrapping of the Bourbon family’s monarchy and the establishment of the Spanish Third Republic. The Bourbons have little respect among the working peoples of Spain and France. After all, it was an ancestor of Felipe VI, Louis XVI of France, who lost his head to a French revolutionary guillotine after ignoring the poverty of the French people.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Madrid Threatens Imprisonment & Death to Catalonia Leaders?

October 11, 2017

Madrid Threatens Imprisonment & Death to Catalonia Leaders?

The Spanish Government is clearly fascist and cannot escape that stigma. The day before the appearance of Carles Puigdemont in front of the regional parliament of Catalonia, the Madrid government has come out and warned of serious bodily threats that one would expect only from a dictator – not an elected democratic government. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s spokesperson, Pablo Casado, came out and rejected all calls for any dialogue in Madrid with Catalonia. “We will not give in, and there is nothing to negotiate with the putschists,” said Casado.

Casados boldly stated publicly: “Anyone who declares it (independence) will end up like the one who declared it 83 years ago.” In Spanish history back in 1934, Lluís Companys i Jover (1882-1940) was the head of Catalonia’s government, which proclaimed itself as an independent state back then as well. He and the entire regional government were arrested after a few hours by the Spanish army. He was exiled to France in 1939 but would not leave because his son was seriously ill. In 1940, Companys was captured and was handed over by the Nazi Gestapo to the dictator Francisco Franco (1939-1975). He was executed in Barcelona at 6:30 a.m. on October 15, 1940 for seeking Catalonian Independence. Lluís refused to wear a blindfold, and was taken before a firing squad of Civil Guards barefoot. When they fired, his last words were ‘Per Catalunya!’ (For Catalonia!). Keep in mind that people were imprisoned for even speaking Catalonia’s language.

More than 90% of voters in Catalonia voted for a separation from Spain BECAUSE of Rajoy’s dictatorial attitude. Here is a banknote from the last independence movement from our collection of the World Monetary System. The opponents of Independence, who had boycotted the vote by a majority, went to the streets of Barcelona on Sunday to protest against the separation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Madrid Waged Cyber-War & Catalonia Votes Overwhelmingly to Leave Spain

October 7, 2017

Madrid Waged Cyber-War & Catalonia Votes Overwhelmingly to Leave Spain

Catalonia voted overwhelmingly to secede from Spain. Of course, the hard line invasion of riot police who beat and threatened the people discouraged many from showing up with the turnout being only 43%. The fascist government in Spain has demonstrated to the entire world that there is a major country risk in dealing with Spain. Any government that uses force against democracy will do whatever it takes to sustain power as the economy gets wose going into 2021.

Hundreds of people were injured by riot police attempting to prevent voting, and this has only caused outrage and further protests solidifying the resolve to separate from such a fascist government. Both Canada and Britain allowed separatist votes. Why Spain deemed the vote illegal was clear that they knew they would vote to leave.

Madrid even waged a cyber-war against Catalonia. They sought to shut down the internet and even ordered Google to shut down traffic coming from Catalonia. Madrid has shown the future civil war tactic will be to shut down the internet to prevent communication.

Catalonia’s parliament may well now declare independence; Madrid could decide to impose direct rule on the region and the police have been transformed into terrorists resembling the imported Russian police in Ukraine. Barcelona is perhaps the most beautiful city in Europe. Obviously, Madrid will be off the tourist agenda in the years ahead.

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