A Corporatist Coup d'Etat Led By Think Tanks, Media Control, and Bribery By Lobbyists

“The mess we’re in now did not begin on Wall Street. Long before the financial collapse, the dismantlement of government regulation was well under way. All the consequences are the result of a brilliantly executed coup. This is the story of the biggest heist in American history.”

"HEIST: Who Stole the American Dream? is stunning audiences across the globe, as it exposes the real truth behind the worldwide economic collapse, tracing its origins to a 1971 secret memo entitled Attack on American Free Enterprise System. Written over 40 years ago by the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, at the behest of the US Chamber of Commerce, the 6-page memo, a free-market utopian treatise, called for a money fueled big business makeover of government through corporate control of the media, academia, the pulpit, arts and sciences and destruction of organized labor and consumer protection groups.

Sound familiar? Today’s crisis and heart stopping headlines can be directly traced to Powell’s real “end game” which was business control of law and politics. Powell’s fingerprints are all over Citizens United, the fateful Supreme Court decision which gave corporations and the super rich unlimited ability to shape our elections with virtually unrestricted donations. HEIST’s step by step detail exposes the systemic implementation of Powell’s memo by BOTH U.S. political parties over the last forty years culminating in the deregulation of industry, outsourcing of jobs and regressive taxation. All of which led us to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the continued dismantling of the American middle class.

Today, politics is the playground of the rich and powerful, with no thought given to the hopes and dreams of ordinary Americans..."

Why take a government by force when you can delude the public, energize a vocal minority, eliminate a few key leaders of any effective opposition thereby setting an example for any others, and through coercion and soft bribery simply buy it?

The Lewis Powell Memo



Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The White House Coup of 1933

The World At War: A New Germany

"A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party...

We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself...

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness" ceases.

Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution."

Henry A. Wallace, 33rd Vice President of the US, The Danger of American Fascism

Feed your anger with fear and pride. Make the deal with the devil if you will. The time for thinking and compromise is over, the time for action is here, they will say.

But remember. The madness will serve none but itself, and its appetite for pain and misery is insatiable. After it devours your so-called enemies, it will come for you.

In memory of Journalist Carl von Ossietzky

"We cannot look to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."

Carl von Ossietzky


"Only one who spent the years following the First World War in Germany can fully understand how hard a battle it was that a man like Ossietzky had to fight. He knew that the tradition of his countrymen, bent on violence and war, had not lost its power. He knew how difficult, thankless and dangerous a task it was. to preach sanity and justice to his countrymen who had been hardened by a rough fate and demoralizing influence of a long war.

In their blindness they repaid him in hatred, persecution and slow destruction; to heed him and to act accordingly would have meant their salvation and would have been a true relief for the whole world.

It will be to the eternal fame of the Nobel Foundation that it bestowed its high honor to this humble martyr and that it is resolved to keep alive the memory of his work. It is also wholesome for mankind today, since the fatal illusion against which he fought has not been removed by the outcome of the last war.

The abstention from the solution of human problems by brute force is the task today as it was then.

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1956

In memory of Carl von Ossietzky, an investigative journalist and editor of Die Weltbühne who died in hospital in Gestapo custody after being held in various prisons and concentration camps.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. The award was controversial because von Ossietzky had been imprisoned for revealing the illegal steps the German government had been taking to rearm militarily.

There are those who believe that no matter what a country may do, it is the duty of its citizens to obey their laws without objection. And there are those who hold the primacy of natural law and private conscience and moral duty to resist evil even when it has been declared by a temporal authority to be legal.



Carl von Ossietzky was born in Hamburg, the son of Carl Ignatius von Ossietzky (1848–1891), a Protestant from Upper Silesia, and Rosalie (née Pratzka), a devout Catholic and Social Democrat. His father worked as a stenographer in the office of a lawyer and senator, but died when Carl was two years old.

During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919 – 1933), his political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society. He was convicted in 1931 of revealing state secrets, the illegal German militarization, and served 18 months in prison. He was released in 1932.

Ossietzky continued to be a constant warning voice against militarism and Nazism when, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazi dictatorship began. Even then, Ossietzky was one of a very small group of public figures who continued to speak out against the now ruling Nazi Party.

On 28 February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was taken by the police and held without trial in 'protective custody' in Spandau prison. Ossietzky underestimated the speed with which the Nazis would go about ridding the country of unwanted political opponents. He was detained afterwards at the concentration camp KZ Esterwegen near Oldenburg, among other camps.

He was visited while in the camp by Swiss historian Carl Jacob Burkhardt, as a representative of the International Red Cross. Burkhardt described Ossietzky as “a deadly pale broken creature, who seemed numb, with one eye swollen over, and his teeth broken.” Ossietzky said,

“Tell my friends that I have come to the end, soon it will be over and that is good. I hear my wife tried to visit me. I only wanted peace.”

Ossietzky's international rise to fame began in 1936 when, already suffering from serious illness that was not being treated, he was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize after an international campaign of people who hoped to achieve his release through this recognition and honor. Despite intimidation and protests directed against the Norwegian government, the Nazis had been unable to prevent this, but they now refused to release him so that he could travel to Oslo to receive the prize.

In an act of civil disobedience, after Hermann Göring, then Minister of the Interior for Prussia and head of the police, prompted him to decline the prize, Ossietzky issued a note from the hospital saying that he disagreed with the authorities who had stated that by accepting the prize he would cast himself outside the deutsche Volksgemeinschaft (community of German people).

'After much consideration, I have made the decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize which has fallen to me. I cannot share the view put forward to me by the representatives of the Secret State Police that in doing so I exclude myself from German society. The Nobel Peace Prize is not a sign of an internal political struggle, but of understanding between peoples. As a recipient of the prize, I will do my best to encourage this understanding and as a German I will always bear in mind Germany's justifiable interests in Europe.'

The award divided public opinion, and was generally condemned by conservative forces. The leading conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten argued in an editorial that Ossietzky was a criminal who had attacked his country "with the use of methods that violated the law long before Hitler came into power" and that "lasting peace between peoples and nations can only be achieved by respecting the existing laws".

Ossietzky's Nobel Prize was not allowed to be mentioned in the German press, and a government decree forbade German citizens from accepting future Nobel Prizes.

The Nobel Peace Prize money was sent to Germany where it was stolen by Ossietzky's Nazi 'defense attorney.'

In May 1936 he was sent to the Westend hospital in Berlin-Charlottenburg because of his tuberculosis, but under Gestapo surveillance. He was largely forgotten during the period of favorable international regard for the Third Reich, sparked in part by the massive public relations campaign surrounding the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the German 'economic miracle.'

Ossietzky died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody, on 4 May 1938, of tuberculosis and from the after-effects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps. In 1938 Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler as their "Man of the Year."

In November of that year, the Reich entered a new phase of their oppression of dissent and undesirables and those to be cast outside the community of the German people, such as the mentally ill, the disabled, Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, and trade unionists, with Kristallnacht.

In 1991, the University of Oldenburg was renamed Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in his honor. This could be seen as a political statement, as Ossietzky's case was being decided upon by the German courts at the time. In 1992 the Federal Court of Justice upheld his 1931 conviction.

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

Martin Luther King

Remember.

"I visited the Esterwegen camp a first time at a re-union of Ossietzky's old friends at the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg. We all went to the old concentration campsite,  now a memorial park,  and Chancellor Willy Brandt spoke to us and former inmates. Many came from the Netherlands since Dutchmen were imprisoned. Esterwegen and Oldenburg are close to the Dutch border.

We learned then that Esterwegen had no gas chambers because the stench and smoke would have disturbed the Oldenburg citizens. On my second visit to Esterwegen in 1990 I found a small memorial museum on the old camp grounds and the curator told me that most inmates were German and Dutch socialists, communists and intellectuals."

Carl von Ossietzky: The Peace Hero In the Concentration Camp by Kurt Singer

Acemoglu and Robinson: Why Nations Fail

In a generally deferential and ineffective Congressional spectacle, some say minuet and I think kabuki dance, Jim DeMint's 'questioning' of Jamie Dimon, who responded to most serious questions with poker faced whoppers, today pushed me over the edge, and so putting the internet feed on mute, I thought I would take a moment to bring the study Why Nation's Fail by Acemoglu and Robinson to your attention.

"Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people,” write Acemoglu and Robinson. Extractive institutions, whether feudalism in medieval Europe or the use of schoolchildren to harvest cotton in contemporary Uzbekistan, transfer wealth from the masses to elites.

In contrast, inclusive institutions—based on property rights, the rule of law, equal provision of public services, and free economic choices—create incentives for citizens to gain skills, make capital investments, and pursue technological innovation, all of which increase productivity and generate wealth. Economic institutions are themselves the products of political processes, which depend on political institutions. These can also be extractive, if they enable an elite to maintain its dominance over society, or inclusive, if many groups have access to the political process. Poverty is not an accident: “Poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty.” Therefore, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, it is ultimately politics that matters.

The logic of extractive and inclusive institutions explains why growth is not foreordained. Where a cohesive elite can use its political dominance to get rich at the expense of ordinary people, it has no need for markets and free enterprise, which can create political competitors. In addition, because control of the state can be highly lucrative, infighting among contenders for power produces instability and violence. This vicious circle keeps societies poor.

In more fortunate countries, pluralistic political institutions prevent any one group from monopolizing resources for itself, while free markets empower a large class of people with an interest in defending the current system against absolutism. This virtuous circle, which first took form in seventeenth-century England, is the secret to economic growth."

James Kwak, Failure Is An Option, A Review of Why Nations Fail

As you know I have often said that in a sovereign fiat currency, inflation and deflation are a policy decision.

Acemoglu and Robinson take this premise a broad step further, and show through many historical examples that national success or failure, as one might define it in terms of the broadest happiness and success for the most people, is also the result largely of policy decisions.

Neither austerity or stimulus will be effective in restoring growth to the American economy. Most if not all of the pain of austerity will fall on the hapless victims and the disenfranchised innocent, while most of the profits of recovery through stimulus will flow to the one percent. No matter what strategy you may employ, it is difficult to be successful against a stacked deck in a rigged game.

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained growth and recovery.

Why Nations Fail

I would tend to add to what Robinson has to say that extractive economic institutions tend to actively promote and fund extractive political movements, laws, public policy, and systems of both the left and the right. Even the subversion of effective government and a descent into near anarchy can serve the monied interests, because effective democratic government is a counterbalance against private power.

At their extremes, neither communism nor fascism nor corporate capitalism are much different, as they both become extractive for the benefit of a small elite at the expense and misery of the people.

Freedom in Europe Is Eroding From the Edges, Financed by the Banks

"Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy."

Slavoj Žižek


"Corruption is a tree, whose branches are of an immeasurable length: they spread everywhere; and the dew that drops from thence hath infected some chairs and stools of authority."

Beaumont and Fletcher, The Honest Man's Fortune

This is a fascinating perspective on the financial situation in Europe from Slavoj Žižek which appeared in a recent edition of the London Review of Books. It reads like a modern variation of an age old script with dollars and bankers replacing bullets and shock troops, at least for now.

The role of Goldman Sachs and some of the other banks, with their attendant politicians who are in many cases now their direct representatives in the erosion of freedom in Europe, is fascinating to watch, in the manner of a train wreck in slow motion.

The monied interests are putting forward their own agendas and candidates while maintaining the charade of popular government, goose-stepping to the tune of financial expediency and the 'iron law of oligarchy' that helped to spawn the cult of the Übermensch at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The counter example is Iceland, and at an earlier period Sweden, which took a different course of action with their banks, direct confrontation and resolution of crony capitalism and the debt trap, rather than accomodation and appeasement.

The US and UK are little better off, having established a temporary equilibrium in which the monied interests are consolidating their gains. How else can one explain the lack of investigations and prosecutions of financial frauds, that become increasingly blatant and brazen, while the national economy continues to stagnate under the burden of crony capitalism and the most powerful political agenda is more tax cuts and sinecures for the super rich? And freedom continues to be assaulted and deconstructed in the name of the endless war on terror.

At some point the people will make a stand, and the Banks will make them an offer which they think that they cannot refuse. This is playing out now in Greece, and is coming to a country near you.

London Review of Books
Save us from the saviours
By Slavoj Žižek
25 May 2012

Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012...

The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current democratic arrangements complain that elections don’t offer a true choice: what we get instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes are almost indistinguishable. On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment (New Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other.

And, as is usually the case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in a panic: chaos, poverty and violence will follow, they say, if the wrong choice is made. The mere possibility of a Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of fear through global markets. Ideological prosopopoeia has its day: markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their ‘worry’ at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural reform.

The citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these prospects: they have enough to worry about in their everyday lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades...

Here is the paradox that sustains the ‘free vote’ in democratic societies: one is free to choose on condition that one makes the right choice. This is why, when the wrong choice is made (as it was when Ireland rejected the EU constitution), the choice is treated as a mistake, and the establishment immediately demands that the ‘democratic’ process be repeated in order that the mistake may be corrected. When George Papandreou, then Greek prime minister, proposed a referendum on the eurozone bailout deal at the end of last year, the referendum itself was rejected as a false choice.

There are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the German-European story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to be brought under control and taught financial discipline) and the Greek story (our national sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy imposed by Brussels).

When it became impossible to ignore the plight of the Greek people, a third story emerged: the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if a war or natural catastrophe had hit the country. While all three stories are false, the third is arguably the most disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle, because it is our struggle too.

Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself.

Read the entire article here.

The Garden of Beasts: Die Nacht der Langen Messer - The Night of the Long Knives

I have finished reading The Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, and I now understand why it is such a popular book of non-fiction.

It is remarkably well-researched, with an impressive set of footnotes based on original sources from diverse places. They are worth reading in themselves as they contain little delights and vignettes. The book provides deep insight into some of the minds of eyewitnesses grappling with the events of the day.

In part because of the source materials, the book spends what one might feel is an inordinate amount of time showing things from the perspective of Ambassador Dodd's daughter, the femme fatale Martha, and her many flirtations and affairs with the prominent of that city, including the head of the Gestapo and an NKVD agent from the Soviet embassy. She is not a particularly sympathetic character, being such an obviously shallow, albeit well-connected, narcissist.   Even these episodes are well written enough to be interesting if one enjoys that sort of background perspective and romantic intrigue.  And it is entertaining to read about the involvement of great literary names like Carl Sandburg and Thorton Wilder,  amongst others.  There is nothing in fame and recognition that deters personal folly.

Ambassador William E. Dodd himself is a frustrating figure, the southern born history professor from the University of Chicago who stumbles into the hornet's nest while looking for a sinecure. He comes across as petty and ineffective, carelessly anti-semitic in the manner of those times, and certainly no hero. And yet in the end he 'does the right thing' and looks good, and quite prescient, in comparison with his fellows. We might make some allowances to the need for a diplomat to be discreet while in office, and to manage perception for the support of official policy.

But it does bring home that point so many miss, that even while great events grind slowly along, ordinary and even extraordinary lives with all their petty preoccupations and diversions go on, the sun still shines, and people marry and are given in marriage, until the moment that, however slowly and in stages it may happen, the door finally closes.   .

I gained a new understanding of how some of the earlier events in the post-Weimar government progressed, and how the rise of the Nazi party unfolded, slowly, with more, but unfortunately ineffective, opposition than we might have believed, at least from 1932 to 1935. And so it was very worthwhile. No one should have been caught by surprise if they had their eyes open.

In particular I finally understand the 'Night of the Long Knives' as more than a passing intramural event as it is depicted so often in documentaries which compress the great sweep of history into an hour or two, and too often crush out the real significance, the many human undercurrents amidst ordinary preoccupations and foibles that comprise great events.

The 'Night of the Long Knives' was the first overtly extra-legal action in the Nazi rise to power. And this might be a lesson for us today as we interpret contemporary events and the perversion of mere legality without regard to morality, tradition, or honor. It was a clear sign of things to come, for those who had a mind to see it.

The book ends with the recall of Ambassador Dodd to Washington, replaced with one of the crony members of 'The Pretty Good Club.' Dachau is full of political prisoners, Jews are being individually terrorized and denied basic human rights, the infirm and defective are being sterilized and murdered, and all political and public information has been brought into conformity with the Nazis through their program of Gleischaltung. 

The real dark night of the soul and Kristallnacht lay in the future, having been born and emboldened by the continuing appeasement in the face of each worsening outrage against all convention and social norms. The Americans could overlook the progression of abuses against others as long as the Hitler regime 'would do business with them.'  It is the fatal weakness of realpolitik, its cumulative moral hazards, writ large. 

It is interesting to contrast the complacency of the career diplomats,  at that time most often Americans of privilege, and their preoccupation with obtaining full payment of the German bonds for their wealthy domestic constituents and the banks, with the agony of the German people as they slowly sunk into the abyss.  The lone voices that were raised in protest were suppressed, ridiculed, marginalized, and ignored even in America.  

This is a fine example of serial policy error in the service of privilege and the status quo. To many amoral minds, including especially the capitalists of the free world, Hitler's rise to power was just another business opportunity, and the plight of his victims a crisis not to be wasted, a source of great profit. And not all those who benefited were censured and punished. Some families rose to greater prominence and power, even in America, on a pile of European corpses.

In Germany the hopes of liberals and moderate conservatives alike fell before the uncompromising obsession for power and unrelenting fanaticism of a minority of some of the most banal and oddest people ever to take power in a major developed nation.   Not one of them could have risen by individual merit, but they did have a talent in exploiting other people's fears and weaknesses, and the sharp and unwavering focus of the sociopaths and psychopaths, that seems to bewilder and beguile the more diffused nature of the average person.

I was struck in fact that the great failure that was made by so many was the assumption that as the leader of a great and educated nation, Hitler was rational, and would eventually make the most rational decisions. So they believed his many assertions of his peaceful intents, and good wishes, even as he turned Europe into an abattoir. Like the efficient market hypothesis, people were blinded to reality by a theory about the natural goodness and rationality of politicians.

The dichotomy is never so apparent as in contrasting the leaders of the movement with their own Aryan ideals: the club footed Goebbels, Himmler the chicken farmer, the sybaritic Göring, the weak minded and superstitious Hess, and the boorish fanatic Hitler.  And the ordinary people made jokes about it, until even humour was crushed under the jackboot, choked out as fear and greed became pervasive.  Through an astute combination of terror, propaganda, and the perversion of the law, an entire people were persuaded to sleepwalk into the abyss.

The author includes, almost as throwaways, some interesting insights into the German character and its mutation under the Nazis.  In particular I was struck by his description of them doting on their dogs and their horses, and the national laws forbidding cruelty to animals, so that the horses, as Dodd the Virginia gentleman farmer observed, were among the fattest and best kept he had ever seen.  And in the end of it all, during the Russian assault that leveled the area around the Tiergarten and the Reichstag, a stray shell struck the stables, and the horses stampeded down the ruined avenues, in flames.

As long as the personal interests of the status quo of the wealthy and powerful were served, those in positions of responsibility said and did nothing, until it was too late even for them.

"What most occupied the attention of the State Department [in 1934] was the outstanding German debt to American creditors. It was a strange juxtaposition. In Germany there was blood, viscera, and gunfire; at the State Department in Washington, there were white shirts [of the wealthy career diplomats and career politicians], Hull's red pencils, and mounting frustration with [Ambassador] Dodd to press America's case [for full payment of the sovereign German debt]...

In Berlin, Dodd was unmoved. He thought it pointless to pursue full payment, because Germany simply did not have the money, and there were far more important issues at stake...

Through his first year in Germany [1933], Dodd had been struck again and again by the strange indifference to atrocity that had settled over the nation, the willingness of the populace and the moderate elements in the government to accept each new oppressive decree, each new act of violence, without protest...

Dodd continued to hope that the murders would so outrage the German public that the [Hitler] regime would fall, but as the days passed he saw no evidence of any such outpouring of anger...

For Dodd, a diplomat by accident, not demeanor, the whole thing was appalling. He was a scholar and a Jeffersonian democrat, a farmer who loved history and the old Germany in which he had studied as a young man. Now there was official murder on a terrifying scale. Dodd's friends and acquaintances, people who had been to his house for dinner or tea, had been shot dead.

Hitler's purge [June 30, 1934] would become known as 'The Night of the Long Knives,' and in time would be considered one of the most important episodes in his ascent, the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement...

This lack of reaction arose partly because many in Germany and elsewhere chose to believe Hitler's claim that he had suppressed an imminent rebellion that would have caused far more bloodshed. Evidence soon emerged, however, that showed that in fact Hitler's account was false...

The controlled press, not surprisingly, praised Hitler for his decisive behaviour...In a letter to Hull, Dodd forecast an even more terroristic regime... 'The people hardly notice this complete coup d'etat. It takes place in silence...I would swear that millions upon millions have no idea what a monstrous thing has occurred.'"

Erik Larson, The Garden of Beasts

The Will to Power and Its Followers in the Socially Immature

"I am afraid we may have, in the near future, friendly fascism. And I do not use the term lightly. I grew up under fascism, in Franco’s Spain, and if nothing else, I recognize fascism when I see it. And we are seeing a growing fascism with a working-class base in the U.S. This is why we cannot afford to see Obama fail. But his staff and advisors are doing a remarkable job to achieve this. Ideologues such as chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel (who, when a congressman, was the most highly funded by Wall Street) and his brother, Ezekiel Emanuel (who did indeed write that old people should have a lower priority for health care spending) are leading the country along a wrong path."

Vincente Navarro, Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Vincent Navarro writes an amazingly insightful political analysis of health care reform and the Obama Adminstration. This is as we would expect, since Navarro, is an M.D., Ph.D., and professor of Health Policy at The Johns Hopkins University and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Health Services.

But then he goes on to end his essay with this remarkably bad prescription.

"Given this reality, it seems to me that the role of the left is to initiate a program of social political agitation and rebellion (I applaud the health professionals who disrupted the meetings of the Senate Finance Committee), following the tactics of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It is wrong to expect and hope that the Obama administration will change. Without pressure and agitation, not much will be done."

The Will to Power has a bewitching siren call. It offers simple solutions to complex problems. It provokes the cycle of problem - reaction - solution, and the eye for an eye approach that 'makes the whole world blind.'

"Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority." James A. C. Brown

And yet, like most dark powers, it decimates and destroys who pick up the sword, and lays waste to them, their country, and their children.

This is the lesson of history, the abyss of madness into which a great leader can bring a nation once it loses its sense of proportion, that people in their passionate desire for power often forget.

The Worst Is Yet to Come

One of the favorite retail analysts in the Cafe is Howard Davidowitz, and he is probably in the top ten overall. The accomplished shoppers in our crowd (predominantly the ladies for some reason, who have a canny sense of price and demand and store quality, whereas yours truly becomes overwhelmed by a numbing dread upon entering most retail establishments of the non-Home Depot or non-electronics persuasion) all tend to shake their heads in agreement when David speaks to the ups and downs of specific store chains and trends. I can think of no higher recommendation, for these are for the most part the front line consumers and they take their duties seriously.

Last night in speaking with a youngish acquaintance just completing law school (another one, alas) who was looking for advice on long term investments we observed that now is the time to remain liquid because 'the worst is yet to come.'

In 1999 I began an intense study of market bubbles and crashes as mentioned before. This included buying contemporary magazines and newspapers and reading them to see what was going through people's minds.

Today reminds me of the briefly sunny period in 1930-1 when most economists and public officials agreed that the Depression was already over and the economy was back on track. President Hoover dismissed a delegation of businessmen who came to Washington with ideas on stabilizing the economy with "Too late gentlemen, the slump is over."

There are few things from my childhood that I remember more vividly than grandmother's comments regarding this false recovery. "If we knew what was coming, we would have killed ourselves." This from as strong a person as I have ever encountered, with a faith that would break rocks. The Great Depression left an indelible mark, or more accurately scar, on her entire family, and my father's as well.

And I never heard the name "Franklin Roosevelt" from her lips without it being preceded by "God bless" followed by "he saved my family." Not all of her children unfortunately. She said she cried so much and so often that she was never able to cry again. And she did not, even at the end.

Of course it was the second half of the great stock decline after the 1929 Crash that did the most damage, because this is when the carnage moved from financial assets and the banks into the real economy, with unemployment rising to 25% into the trough of the Depression in 1930.

Roosevelt came into office and began spending and innovating with programs to attempt to mitigate the impact of the economic collapse on America's families. Other countries, such as Italy, German and Japan, made their own political choices. We need to bear in mind that America itself came perilously close to a genuine brand fascism, and not the cartoon caricature presidential overreach cited by the corporate elites of the day. Hitler and Mussolini were the solutions proposed by the industrialists, they were their men, and they bankrolled them heavily.

And so here we are. What comes next is anyone's guess. But by now you should be accepting and internalizing the general themes, including the devaluation of the dollar down to levels that are probably still not believable, an activist central government nationalizing key industries, civil unrest and agitation, and a confusing cacophony of hysterical mumbo jumbo coming from media whores and corrupt officials.

The crisis is not over. We have just finished the beginning, the easy part, the initial collapse of the bubble. The worst is yet to come.

Watch the video of this commentary from Howard Davidowitz linked below if you get an opportunity. His delivery is priceless New York style.


"The Worst Is Yet to Come": If You're Not Petrified, You're Not Paying Attention
Aaron Task
May 15, 2009 09:31am EDT

The green shoots story took a bit of hit this week between data on April retail sales, weekly jobless claims and foreclosures. But the whole concept of the economy finding its footing was "preposterous" to begin with, says Howard Davidowitz, chairman of Davidowitz & Associates.

"We're in a complete mess and the consumer is smart enough to know it," says Davidowitz, whose firm does consulting for the retail industry. "If the consumer isn't petrified, he or she is a damn fool."

Davidowitz, who is nothing if not opinionated (and colorful), paints a very grim picture: "The worst is yet to come with consumers and banks," he says. "This country is going into a 10-year decline. Living standards will never be the same."

This outlook is based on the following main points:

With the unemployment rate rising into double digits - and that's not counting the millions of "underemployed" Americans - consumers are hitting the breaks, which is having a huge impact, given consumer spending accounts for about 70% of economic activity.

Rising unemployment and the $8 trillion negative wealth effect of housing mean more Americans will default on not just mortgages but student loans and auto loans and credit card debt.

More consumer loan defaults will hit banks, which are also threatened by what Davidowitz calls a "depression" in commercial real estate, noting the recent bankruptcy of General Growth Properties and distressed sales by Developers Diversified and other REITs.

As for all the hullabaloo about the stress tests, he says they were a sham and part of a "con game to get private money to finance these institutions because [Treasury] can't get more money from Congress. It's the ‘greater fool' theory."

"We're now in Barack Obama's world where money goes into the most inefficient parts of the economy and we're bailing everyone out," says Daviowitz, who opposes bailouts for financials and automakers alike. "The bailout money is in the sewer and gone."

The Worst Is Yet To Come (Video) - Howard Davidowitz

The Plot to Overthrow FDR - The History Channel

The beginnings of the Great Depression, and the conflicts that tested the Republic to its foundations, and the commitment to freedom around the world.


Video Documentary The History Channel

The Plot to Overthrow FDR



The American Liberty League


Responses to the Great Depression 1929-1939

Weekend Listening: The White House Coup of 1933 - BBC4

This is an interesting topic, not because we believe in a plot by the wealthy and powerful Americans to throw in their lot with the more pro-business Hitler and Mussolini, but because it helps to portray the early days of the Great Depression in a more realistic light.

They were not a time of dignified suffering and widespread acts of kindness and compassion. They were often mean-spirited, violent, fraught with scams and snares for the weak, a particularly dangerous time in America with the rise of demagogues from both the Left and Right.

This was a difficult period in our history, poorly understood and insufficiently studied in our schools. Here is one aspect of it of which you may never have heard. It tends to upset people, because it disturbs the conventional view of history. This is not particular to the US.

There is no smoking gun in this program. There was a plot. It was investigated and the details of the investigation were not disclosed An American military hero, Smedley Butler, exposed it. This much we do know.

BBC4 does a reasonably even handed job of presenting facts, and surmise, and differentiating them.

Our friend Bart, at NowandFutures.com, has converted the radio broadcast to MP3 and has made it available here:

The White House Coup of 1933


Additional Reading:

The Business Plot of 1933 - Wikipedia

Smedley Butler - Wikipedia

American Liberty League - Wikipedia