Michael Parenti: Functions of Fascism and Capitalism's Self Inflicted Wounds

One thing that Parenti does not discuss is the similarity between state communism and fascism in their anti-humanism, central planning, and self-destructive fanaticism.

Many thinkers distinguish between fascism and communism in their attitude toward globalization: the fascists are nationalists and the communists are internationalists.

I believe that my model of the socio-political continuum bridges that gap by referencing the extremes against a measure of their attitude towards the individual as a reference, and not in their approach to how they might organize a world government to which they all seem to aspire.

It also helps to explain how easily parties can cross the divide between the extremes. A Hitler can take a workers party like the NSDAP and turn it into a fascist dictatorship. The neo-cons can morph from far left to far right.

Extremes call out to their opposite extremes. Communism breeds fascism, and vice versa.  Extremes breed extremes, and crowd out the balanced approach to life of the mind, body, and spirit. 

And those on the extremes can no longer see the middle ground;  everything becomes 'the other.'  And so they first fail by avoiding all compromise as a sign of weakness in their increasing ideological rigidity, and then compound error upon extreme error as they silence their critics.  Their errors compounded, they finally take themselves and their followers into the abyss of their own excess.

Parenti is certainly further to the left of my own views.  He seems to be a progressive by much more comfortable with the role of government.   And yet government has a role.

One may not make the poor better off by destroying the rich, but one can certainly help the greater part of the public from becoming poor by restraining the rich and the powerful with the rule of law, transparency and enforcement,  and equal justice for all.  And that requires a good government with the power and willingness to enforce the law.

Great wealth unexplained is often the accumulation of a series of crimes and illegalities undiscovered, from insider trading to market manipulation, monopolies and official corruption, occasionally mixed in with sheer dumb luck and ruthless disregard for the law.

That is why the wealthy are rarely the great artists, athletes, or inventors who they hold up as the example of excellence to which they can hardly presume. They modern wealthy generally create nothing except a climate of injustice, fraud, and corruption.

"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime
oublié, parce qu' il a été proprement fait."

"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account
is a crime that has never been found out, because it was well executed."

Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot

Chris Hedges: Resistance and Faith, Faith and Unbelief - Prague Spring 1968

“Each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Robert Francis Kennedy


"Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance."

Václav Havel, Letter to Alexander Dubček, August 1969

The impulse to freedom and democracy always seems weak and hopeless when matched against the forces of oppression, because aggressive oppression is always more single-minded, having already crushed internal dissent and perspective, and is generally better organized and equipped.

And yet even the greatest tyrannies have fallen, always. This is because they carry within themselves the seeds of their own renewal and return to balance, or utter destruction.

As in most human things, their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness, and it is their inability to master and evolve that strength, to reform and achieve sustainability, that brings them crashing down, every time. Their strength is their weakness, in its overreach and self-absorption.




Faith, Unbelief, and Their Fundamentalisms



The Locus of Intolerance and the Objectification of the Other



I am sure that Hedges would agree that, as a person, he is subject to the same impulses, the same tendencies, the same foibles, the same snares of pride, harsher moments and failures to love, that he descries so capably in their more extreme manifestations of the abuse of faith and humanness.

I would have liked to have seen a little more expansion of the continuum of unbelief to include the uncertainty of agnosticism versus the certainty of atheism, for I believe that to be a fateful threshhold which one crosses with their own 'leap of faith' as it were, that being the difference between 'I do not know' and I am certain enough to declare and commit myself, whether it be for faith or for unbelief. - Jesse

At Their Extremes, Most Belief Systems Become Indistinguishable From their Putative Opposites

I noticed today that I have never posted a memoir which I had intended about Prague, and my time as a forty year old 'student' at a symposium there when I was taking my MBA in 1991, a period of great change. I shall have to do that sometime. I thought I had done so already.

It was particularly meaningful to me because this is where my father's grandfather had been from many years ago. And of course it is a city with a great tradition of learning, manufacturing, and engineering.   And the 'hometown' of my great-grandfather, although all family traces seem to have been erased by time, and by the decisions of the great powers to hand the region over first to the Germans and then to the Soviets.

Coincidentally enough I am informed by readers via email that two organizations have blocked access to Le Café Américain of late: the government of mainland China, although I think that applies to all blogs and has been on and off for some time, and just recently Bank of America. Plus ça change, plus c'est la similar bureaucratic mentality.

'Prague Spring' 1968 - The 99 Percent

Marta Kubišová, Modlitba pro Martu , 1968

Let peace continue with this country.
Let wrath, envy, hate, fear and struggle vanish.
Now, when the lost reign over your affairs will return to you, people, it will return.

The cloud is slowly sailing away from the skies,
Everyone is reaping his own harvest.
Let my prayer speak to the hearts that are
Not burned by the times of bitterness like blooms by a late frost.

Let peace continue with this country.
Let wrath, envy, hate, fear and struggle vanish.
Now, when the lost reign over your affairs will return to you, people, it will return.

Let my prayer speak to the hearts that are
Not burned by the times of bitterness like blooms by a late frost.

Let peace continue with this country.
Let wrath, envy, hate, fear and struggle vanish.
Now, when the lost reign over your affairs will return to you, people, it will return.

Jan Palach Memorial, Wenceslas Square, Prague, 1989

The Political Continuum and the Uncomfortable Center

It will be important to keep this model in mind as we go forward.

Turmoil and crisis favor polarization, and fear brings out the extremes of both sides who unfortunately tend to make the most noise, because they are often wrong but rarely in doubt.

It will be hard to maintain a centered approach if you are independent or moderate. The far right will see you as a leftist, and the far left will see you as on the right. This does not say much about you and your thinking, but more about them and their unbalanced approach to the serious problems facing the developed nations.

It is hard to talk reasonably to anyone holding a position that is not held in reason, by its very nature. And so we might find ourselves caught in the middle as it were when the histrionics start in earnest.

Even in matters of faith, there are conflicts with the distortions of the far right, who hold faith as a rationale for their own ends rather than an end in itself. I do not judge, but I can listen. And when someone holds forth about a God without compassion and love, and when they reject His own laws, they declare themselves for what they are, rather than anything about Him.

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

For a believer in one God, Jew, Moslem, or Christian,  everything else is commentary, a 'how-to' and important for the individual on their particular Way, but tragically far too often a snare and a temptation, a place where people wish to hide, to avoid and resist obeying His righteous commands, and to feed their own passions and desires for power and privilege and place.

As for the irreligious far left, they are simply given in to the opposite pursuit of the will to power and glorification of the State (themselves) over all, in the manner of fascists but with a different name. The only freedom they truly desire is the freedom to dominate and enforce their wills as superior beings. They despise the common people, and that permeates their words.   They view themselves apart, and most often don't want anything to do with them after the initial struggle is done and the people have bled for them.

This is why the so-called neo-conservatives were so easily able to shift from far left to far right. They still view the world in the same distorted ways, but with different labels. As Aristotle might have said, it is all a question of balance.

Neither side wants anything to do with the individual soul and spirit of genuine love. They are 'campaigners' fully engaged in expediency for their cause, and its end is power. This is why a period of reform is so often frought with danger of one extreme or the other.

This is all to say, remember, as uncomfortable as it may seem at times, as each side grows louder and more strident, you are not alone. Our calling is to stay the course, maintain the happy medium, and keep the fires burning, and the children fed and warm.

US Monetary Aggregates Update - Failure to Reform - At the Edges of the Policy Continuum

Dude, where's my deflation?

It may seem a little counter-intuitive, that the money supply measurements are growing strongly, at the same time that the growth of consumer credit and spending remains sluggish, with GDP lagging.

Well, perhaps not so sluggish as some might wish to portray, as show in the last chart, but certainly not with enough force to bring back jobs.  The Fed can create money but not real growth.

As a reminder, the changes in money supply are not independent, and must be judged in relation to other things in the real economy to determine their nature and its effects. Growth must match growth, and decline, decline, over some reasonable period of time and trend, in relation to population, real transactions ex-financial, or some other measure of genuine economic activity.

That is one of the better arguments, by the way, against the use of a gold standard.  To say that there is not enough gold is ludicrous, since it is just a relative thing, a matter of valuation.  The drawback is that the supply of gold seems to grow stubbornly slow, and may not keep pace with the growth of the economy in response to some event like the industrial revolution.  This could be handled by the revaluation of the gold and the currencies, so again one wonders how real the objection is.  Its greatest opposition is from those who wish to exercise a more flexible and stealthy monetary control.  

As I said I am not in favor of such a standard now, as the economies of the west are too weak to support their rigor, and they would be quickly corrupted.  A bi-metallic standard holds more promise, but that too is a discussion for another time.  These are remedies best used before the fact, and not ex post facto in response to long years of monetary abuse and distortions.

Increasing the money supply in response to a credit crisis, which the Fed is doing with historic vigor, is a blunt instrument. And despite all the so-called proofs and theories to the contrary, they said they would do it, they could do it, and so they are doing it.

There is certainly no lack of people who remain obstinate in their errors and illusions. I have a little more respect for those who try to maintain their theories while at least accepting the obvious. But unless they can create a whole of it, their theory is found to be lacking.

Money is a little esoteric I admit, but the mindsets of those who have been wrong for so long is even more mysterious to me, unless one assumes some misinformed, cultish adherence. And as forecast, their rationales and arguments are becoming increasingly hysterical, in every sense of the word. They are even reluctant and resistant to accepting any 'existence proofs.'

"...we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- I refute it thus."

Boswell, Life of Johnson

Deflation and Inflation in an otherwise unconstrained fiat currency regime is a policy choice. The restraints come from any external standards including the acceptance at value of the currency by those outside the system. This is what the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory, those sons of Zimbabwe, fail to understand. At the end of the day, money printing at will must always resort to continual expansion and the threat of force to maintain its value. And when that force fails, the money fails.

The Fed certainly can do more to curtail speculation and incent real money into productive activity rather than speculation in a web of financial instruments. The Fed as bankers have rarely done well with their regulatory functions. And it would be denounced as 'political' and interfering with the [rampant fraud and looting in the] markets.

Rather it is to the governance of the nation, and fiscal and legislative policy, that the nation must turn. Unfortunately that segment of governance is caught in the same credibility trap as the rest of the country's fortunate ones who profited abundantly from the status quo and the financial bubble, and are feeling very smug about it, rationalizing self-proclaimed genius in their delusions, and 'winning.'

Make no mistake, as a policy choice deflation is possible. And for debtor nations to voluntarily choose deflation, in the artificial constraint of money and debt in pursuit of a stronger currency, without systemic reforms to address what specifically caused the recent credit crisis, is an act of national suicide. Minds fixed to extremes either can not or will not see or find the via media, the middle ground. They pass from extreme to extreme without ever finding a balance.

If one considers the Political and Economic Continuum I have constructed before, it is easier to understand this, and how the neo-liberals can become neo-conservatives, seemingly overnight.  The energy to cross the boundary from one extreme to another is less than the required energy and effort of returning to the center.  

At that end of the scale one sees only their extreme counterparts, and loses the ability to view the more distant middle ground, the vast center of society.  It is more than a willful blindness; it is a pathological disconnect from reality and the particular, an implosion of the self into a dissolute abstraction of slogans, symbols, and ideas.

And the extremes will tend towards distortion and delusion, as life does not flourish naturally on the tails of probability.  The far Left is as noxious and rarefied as the far Right.  At the end of the day, there is relatively little distance between them in terms of what it means to be specifically human.  The others, the great mass of humanity clustered at the center, becomes fully objectified, stereotyped, and statistical.  The far ends of the continuum are the well springs of the cults of death.

From a practical standpoint, central planning, whether it is performed by faceless bureaucrats or the monoplies of oligarchs, will tend to corruption and failure.
The path being pursued by some Western nations today seems to be untenable and lacking balance, and so the bleeding begins.  Crony capitalism has the momentum to create ever bigger losers and winners.  They are unwilling, and seemingly incapable of, discussing and investigating the frauds, much less correcting them. They fear to implicate themselves, and to disturb their 'good thing.'   And so they keep pressing forward to the hard stop, and the precipice.

The governance of old has tolerated the occasional bloodbath, so long as the few might personally benefit, as corrupt governments, mad rulers, and empires are wont to do. I pray not for that tragedy there, or anywhere.

Reform is the hard medicine that the governance of the country refuses to take. The failure is with the establishment as they once quaintly called it, the monied interests in a former age, and as always, the venality, blind ambition, and vanity of the privileged.

Update on the Political Continuum: Obama Moves Sharply Towards Nationalizaton

Obama is moving slowly but surely towards more overt state socialism.

There is an interesting twist of crony capitalism in his Administration especially from his economics team. It will be interesting to see how that develops. Will it become something akin to the post-Soviet Russian oligarchs with official state ties?

The Political and Economic Continuum: Where Are We Today, Where Are We Going?

This essay from the International Herald Tribune is a sound analysis of where we are now and where we have been. It reinforces our notion that the old ways of approaching problems have failed. A new school of economics will rise out of the ashes of the economic failure to come as Keynesianism rose out of the Great Depression, as monetarism rose out of stagflation.

With regard to free market capitalism, we still think it is the best approach to a well-functioning society, but would like to see a return to it at least here in the United States. Sociopathic elements always try to corrupt the game, replacing the meritocracy with oligopoly and competition with monopolistic croney capitalism. Freedom is not a goal; it is a way of life.

The solution seems obvious: a society of laws that respects the rights of the individual to both excel or just get by in a meritocracy, with an equitable distribution of goods with a reasonable variation based on effort and ability, enforced with equal justice. The trick seems to be not imagining a solution, but rather in implementing it, achieving it, and keeping it.

The dynamic tension is not between the traditional right and traditional left in politics. That is largely a matter of preference between the amounts of tradition and progress, and the rate of societal change. The genuine conflict is between the power of the state and of the individual, between the will to power of an elite and the broad rights of the individual to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The extremes of both Left and Right meet in the same place: Stalin and Hitler, the all-consuming state and the complete diminishment of the rights of the Individual.

"The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite." - Thomas Jefferson

"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power." Benjamin Franklin

"The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A republic, if you can keep it."

The failure of neo-liberalism
By Phillip Blond
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
LANCASTER, England

More and more, it appears that in the 21st century we are returning to the economics of the 19th, where wealth was overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few owners and astute speculators.

Neither the Right nor the Left seem capable of creating a society in which all benefit from increased prosperity and economic security.

Right-wing claims that free markets will enrich all sections of society are palpably false, while the traditional European welfare state appears to penalize innovation and wealth-creation, thereby locking the poor and unskilled into institutionalized poverty and unemployment.

Thus in the new age of globalization, both ideologies create the same phenomenon: an underclass caught between welfare and low wages, a heavily indebted middle class increasingly subject to job and pension insecurity and a new class of the super rich who escape all rules of taxation and community.

It was in Britain that neo-liberalism first emerged in its decisive form. Confronted with union militancy and the apparent bankruptcy of the welfare state, the Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979. In America, Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, and the Anglo-Saxon countries have pursued and advocated free market liberalization ever since.

Today, its reach extends as far as communist China, which, while eschewing political freedom, fervently preaches economic liberalization. This year even the French acknowledged free market supremacy, electing a president who has persistently denounced the costs of Gallic welfarism and praised the economic advantages of the Anglo-Saxon model.

But the benefits of free market liberalization depend on who you are, where you are and how much money or assets you had to begin with.

In terms of economic development, free market fundamentalism has been a disaster. The free market solutions applied to Russia during the Yeltsin years succeeded only in mass impoverishment, the creation of a hugely wealthy oligarchical class and the rise of an authoritarian government.

Similarly, the growth rates of Latin America and Africa, which had been higher than other developing nations, dropped by over 60 percent after they embraced IMF-sponsored neo-liberalism in the 1980's, and have now ground to a halt.

On an individual level, a similar story pertains. Real wage increases in the top 13 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been below the rate of inflation since about 1970.

Thus wage earners - rather than asset owners - have faced a persistent 30-year downward pressure on their standard of living. It comes as no surprise to learn that the golden age for the wage worker, expressed as a percentage share of GDP, was between 1945 and 1973, and not under economic liberalization.

Nobody questions that trade increases prosperity, and that the liberalization of credit and financial services allow hitherto excluded groups to supplement their wages by buying shares or houses and thus participating in the asset economy.

But the real story of neo-liberal success is not the extension of assets to all, but the huge and disproportionate share of wealth attained by the very rich. In the United States, between 1979 and 2004 the wealthiest 1 percent saw an increase in their share of national income of 78 percent, whereas 80 percent of the population saw an overall decrease in their income share by 15 percent. That's a wealth transfer from the large majority to a tiny minority of some $664 billion.

The traditional Left panicked in the face of neo-liberal hegemony and spoke in the 1980's of redistribution, higher taxes and restrictions on capital transfers. But, outside of Scandinavia, they were whistling in the wind: Traditional state-regulated economies appeared locked into high unemployment and low growth.

A new path for the Left was offered by the country that first experienced the new Right: the UK. By the late 1990's, Britain was exhausted by Thatcherism; its public services were failing and the country was socially and economically fragmented. Thus in 1997 New Labor was elected.

Under the guidance of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the new progressives promised that the benefits of rising prosperity would be applied to the public sector and the poor. Social exclusion would be tackled by opening up education and extending opportunity to all. The rest of the world was once more transfixed by the social experiment taking place in Britain. Could this seemingly exclusive neo-liberal circle be squared for the benefit of all?

Sadly, after 10 years the conclusion has to be no.

Poverty in Britain doubled under Thatcher, and this figure has become permanent under New Labor. The share of the wealth, excluding housing, enjoyed by the bottom half of the population has fallen from 12 percent in 1976 to just 1 percent now. Thirteen million people now live in relative poverty. Social mobility has declined to pre-war levels.

The least able children from the richest 20 percent of the population now overtake the most able children from the bottom 20 percent by the age of seven. Nearly half of the richest group go on to get university degrees while only 10 percent of the poorest manage to graduate. Clearly, the New Left has entrenched class division even more firmly than the neo-liberal Right.

This in a nutshell is the problem: Both Left and Right seem incapable of challenging monopoly capitalism. Neither welfarism nor statism can transform the lives of the poor, and neither, it seems, can neo-liberalism. Only a shared economy can correct the natural tendency of the free market to favor monopolies.

But we can only share if all own. Thus there is a radical and as yet unexplored possibility - that of a general and widely distributed ownership and use of assets, credit and capital. This would dissolve the conflict between capital and labor since it would be a market without monopoly and a state where waged labor - since it was the owner of capital - did not need state welfare.

Phillip Blond is a senior lecturer in philosophy and theology at the University of Cumbria.

The Failure of Neo-Liberalsim

„Niemand ist hoffnungsloser versklavt, als die, die fälschlicherweise glauben, sie seien frei.“
(None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.)

J. W. von Goethe