People are a little stunned that so much of the Wall Street corporate and financials sectors have rolled over so easily for the Obama administration, witness the dutiful manner in which all the major communications companies turned over their cellphone data without a whimper.
After all, it was legal, we’re told.
Back in February, 2010, while at RedState, I said this very thing, advising everyone to get a land line, and use it, saving the cell phone only for discussing the NBA playoffs or getting a grocery list from the wife. Obama said then that cell-phone users “do not have an expectation of privacy” (no doubt on Holder’s advice), and while he’s not saying those exact words now (since the cat’s out of the bag), privately he is saying we should consider ourselves as having been fairly warned. (That’s Obama’s idea of fair play, giving a coded heads-up three years before the hammer falls.)
Let’s just cut to the chase and say that what we are seeing today is fascism, writ large, and not cronyism between government and the Big Business private sector. These corporations are not sucking up to the government (well, not entirely) so much as they all have a gun to their heads. And this is what all businesses and citizens will do once they too have a gun to their heads.
The difference is simple really. Cronyism is the result of the private sector trying to create sweetheart relationships with government in order to get financial favors, usually contract preferences. Fascism is just the opposite, when it is the state with the come-hither glances and bedroom eyes, for an entirely different purpose.
As history proves, and we are witnessing this very day, the state’s seductions quickly turn to rape.
And rape is an exercise of raw power. Up and down the line, they rape because they can, not because they need the gratification.
To swear allegiance to your political patron is one thing. But to put on that Party pin is quite another. Then it becomes a betrothal.
First an engagement ring, then a wedding band. Then a harness. Then finally, a noose.
Power is the condition precedent for the crony-capitalism of the past and the fascism of today. It has been completely reversed since the 1970s, and the brightest corporate minds on Wall Street never saw it coming. Or maybe they did.
Until the 1970s, at the state level, power found mostly in the highway departments, who let all the state road contracts; a major part of the state’s budget, but still a minor part of the state’s GNP. A major state contractor still couldn’t get a membership at most of the more exclusive country clubs, e.g.. (Rodney Dangerfield)
In this same period, at the federal level, this power-of-the-state-purse was found in the Defense Department, who let all the military contracts. It was Eisenhower who first noted the uneasy prospects of the same kind of state-private sector alliance being created in America he’d thrown down in Germany. He called it the Military-Industrial Complex, and said “Beware” as he left office.
Today, 70% or 80% of all that federal money (and power) has shifted from the military sector over into the domestic public sector; an array of special relationships formed between EPA and its environmental contracts, Energy and its beneficiaries (Solyndra), or Education and their union networks, all with the ability to funnel a sizable percentage of those contracts right back into the coffers of the Democrat Party and the President (the “enabling agents”) so the money can go right out and do it all over again in the next election cycle. Rush Limbaugh calls this “money laundering,” which it is.
Who is doing the money laundering are the fascists. And who the dogs being walked and who are handling the leashes is also for certain.
So, today, with the state as the moving party in this romance with Big Business, we get a totally different picture of “trickle down”.
In not many years, all the way down to who owns the local 7/11 convenience store, it will depend entirely on who the party patron is. They will all be wearing wedding bands.
Try to recall Oskar Schindler, in Schindler’s List, trying to bribe his way into favor with a regional German general in charge of procuring field equipment. All he wanted was to be able to grab off a miniscule contract supplying the Wehrmacht with mess kits and kitchenware. A really tiny piece of the pie.
After having been in power for about nine years, the art of political bribery in Nazi Germany had trickled down from the top of the economic pecking order where the Krupps and von Schachts sat, to the table leavings of petty supply officers doling out $35,000 contracts for messkits.
Up and down the line of Party membership, everyone had a piece of this pie, which they then doled out in smaller portions to enrich select boot-lickers in exchange for off-the-book favors and quid pro quos. Nothing was ever given for nothing.
Every aspect of this behavior looks and smells like crony capitalism, only it’s not because all the power is owned by the state and doled out only to supporters who will pay their “tithes” in a variety of ways to stay in business.
Every American businessman understands this simple rule today. When the state is powerful enough to destroy you, you either go along or you die. The same power to lift you from turbulent seas can also tie a cement block around your ankles.
So everyone within the hearing range of my voice today also understands this law: when the state takes aim directly at your job, or your House, or your personal security and comfort, you will fall into line if the only other option is to “die,” used here only metaphorically (for now) for losing your job, and all that goes with that.
This is why Army majors who want to be lieutenant colonels will vigorously implement the new policy about expressions of religious faith (mentioned by Erick Brockway) against other members of the armed forces. Laying all other beliefs aside, their rice bowl is tied to doing this, and doing this well. This is also why the Army specialist, with no job prospects back home (thanks to the Commander in Chief for that, Trooper), and who wants to get married with base housing, IF only he can make sergeant, will simply take off that cross around his neck, stow the Bible in his footlocker, start missing Sunday mass, and cut out the crossing and Ave’s, since, forewarned, he knows that every corner of his world now has eyes and ears.
It will take a few years, but before long, Christians will no longer apply in this hostile environment. And that is the point.
This is how Janissaries and Praetorians are born. First clear the detritus with a seine net.
Over a period of years virtually every adult American will come to this crossroad in one way or another. With the desert encroaching, rolling in faster every month, as every rooted plant of our republic is bent and bowed, leaving behind only gullies of sand and erosion, there will be nothing to hold the soil.
(It’s because I know this that I have always recommended a “dark alley” approach to resistance so that resistors can avoid sanctions that will impact heavily on their families and homes. We are now entering a newer, darker phase of government-sponsored sand erosion, so I renew my earlier advice to cut back on the cell phone use. And if some guy pisses you off on Facebook, go poison his favorite rose bush. Just keep your powder dry and stay in the shadows.)
And it’s all legal
Obama reminded us only the other day that all this seizing of cell-phone records is legal.
It always is. It always was. “It’s legal” has always been the first refuge of the tyrant.
As a kid, I thought that the Communists and Nazis were thugs who could just storm into your house on a whim and carry you away to a camp. But actually they all carried writs. Remember the ATF storm troopers “rescuing” Elian Gonzalez? They had signed papers in hand. The AP and James Rosen warrant scandal proved they can always find a friendly judge who will sign off on just about any invasion of privacy. (Message received loud and clear.)
Alexandr Solzhenitsen reminded me of how insistent bureaucratic regimes are about having a written law backing up their invasions. Article 58. The catch-all article. We know this was the case in Nazi Germany as well, where the state had total written, legal power, to do just about anything to just about anyone for just about anything. Today, it’s called “parsing the rules,” a Bill Clinton invention in the 1990s, and which guides Holder’s and Obama’s actions today, up to and including killing American citizens if they pose enough of a threat. (We already know that half of us do pose such a threat, so follow the logic.)
Solzhenitsyn was arrested for writing derogatory comments about Stalin in private letters to a friend. He was accused of anti-Soviet propaganda under Article 58 paragraph 10 of the Soviet criminal code, and of “founding a hostile organization” under paragraph 11.
The kicker was Section 12, which allowed for onlookers to be prosecuted for not reporting instances of section 10, in case you’re wondering how he was caught. To snitch or not to snitch.
Thanks to Facebook, Yahoo and Google, finding out much of these things are a breeze today. Do you remember the Virginia Marine who was arrested and committed for psychiatric observation all because of a Facebook post, reported 0n by a total stranger, and ordered institutionalized by an idiot magistrate without the authority to do so?
The Soviet Code did not even require that many of their criminal laws be published. The Soviet logic for this was so contorted and filled with Marxist doublespeak I’ll spare you, but it’s not unlike the language used by Cass Sunstein and other fellow travelers when hoisting a few, or by virtually every bureaucracy’s spokesman when justifying imponderable regulations they just used to levy a fine, or refuse a Christian a permit to replace the shingles on his roof.
So look for that in the near future.
So, why fascism and not socialism?
I still get hoisted from time to time for using the term “fascist,” but it is what it is.
First, “socialism” has taken on a kind of silly respectability among the stupids, especially the educated ones, so much so that it has no sting. If I call someone a name, I want it to sting, especially when I can then stand up and prove it.
Fascism is a form of socialism (the Bolsheviks called it “middle class socialism” in the 20s- Maurice Hindus, The Great Offensive). Europeans and East Coast snotties insist there is a big difference; mainly militarism and xenophobic nationalism. Technically that may have been true in 1930, as applied to the about-to-be-unhomogenized homogeneous nations as found in Scandinavia. But modern Euros have quietly dropped “racism” from their list of disqualifiers since their new “guest workers” never ever liked the Jewish bogeymen of the 1930s, and alternately believe they never really were persecuted, or deserved it. Their sensitivities must be respected, the quaking Euros believe. (This will get uglier.)
But in America, we still have all sorts of bogeymen. Every day we’re getting closer to a kind of Hitlerian fascism because we have lots of Christians, and lots of people who swear fealty to the Constitution, most of them wearing both hats, two clearly identified enemies of the new state.
There is enough get-even hatred for these groups alone within the American ruling class, including the GOP, to satisfy any actions that might appear beyond the pale…if they weren’t also legal.
“Fascism” is the only operable term that works, then. Let the Swedes have their socialism.
So I stand on my pronouncement: This is fascism. If you disagree, either take a hike or hire a hall and prove me wrong. And I’ll do what I always threaten, to pick 10 random names from the Tea Party phone book (if Obama will let me have it back) who will then intellectually prove you all wrong.
My next tip: Besides cellphones, I recommend you buy or gather up every book on religion and the US Constitution you can find, from Aquinas to Martin Luther to Watchman Nee, to CS Lewis, to de Tocqueville to Hayek to The Federalist, plus any good world or American history written before the progressives took over.
You don’t have to read them. Just store them. Just save them, for in a few years they will likely disappear, at least new ones, and people like Amazon and eBay will be encouraged not to offer used ones. (Both have the corporate spines of jellyfish.) Knowing someone is watching, skittish people will be encouraged not to buy them online with credit cards and mailing addresses, so the business will all but disappear except at flea markets. I expect the IRS tactics we’re seeing today against voters will get around to Christian and Jewish writers, moralists and their publishers later on. I think many writers’ agents already see this coming.
Hide these books in the root cellars right next to where you’ve hidden the prayer shawl, crucifix and icons.
FYI
