Fascism Is Not Coming To America

This graphic is an update: (4 Oct 2016 0525z)

Fascism is NOT coming to America. It is here already. The American version is also sometimes called Corporatism. Or Crony Capitalism. David Stockman rails against it in this article

…since 1987 when Greenspan arrived at the Fed in this era of bubble finances I call it incepted, we basically have a bifurcated economy. The bottom 90% of the population has no more real net worth today if you use an honest inflation measure to deflate nominal values. It has no more net worth today than it did in 1987. That’s nearly 30 years of going nowhere. The top 1% has gained 300% in net worth, which the Forbes 400 to take the final clip on this, is 1,000% gain.

Now, that’s not market capitalism at work. That is a, as I called it, a deformed or mutant system of crony capitalism and finance-driven economic life coming right out of the central bank and that whole complex of unsound policy that has produced a result that is very unsustainable. Not only has there been no net worth gain as we lay out in the book but if you just go to the year 2000, real median household income – again, deflated with, I think, an accurate measure of the cost of living faced by most households – is down nearly 20% from where it was when Bill Clinton was shuffling out of the White House.

Charles Hugh-Smith has this to say:

The crony-capitalist answer is always the same, of course: bribe the government to create and enforce private monopolies. This process has many variations, but a favored one is to deepen the regulatory moat around an industry to the point that competition is virtually eliminated and innovation is shackled.

Businesses protected by the regulatory moat can charge whatever they wish, becoming monopolistic rentiers that are parasites on the consumer and economy.

State-crony-capitalism destroys democracy and the economic vitality of the nation. I’ve covered this many times, and there is no solution to this oppressive marriage of state and monopoly other than innovations that open wormholes in the monopoly.

Chief IO has a rather long comment on the subject. This is an excerpt:

Monsanto pushing legislation to ban private traditional seeds and seed sharing, and promoting GMO products. (Why would a seed company want to ‘destroy’ a seed market? So you must come to the company store…)

EPA is used to forbid all sorts of things that can be done easily and cheaply, and where the alternative is very expensive (and available from very few, or one, supplier). So, want to make your own “trash to fuel FT machine”? Well, better check out all the “regulations” on fuel refining and production … if you don’t have a few full time lawyers to fill out the paperwork and a few more to defend against the EPA suing you, it’s a no-go. And who DOES have those lawyers? AND the already established refineries? Oh yeah…

Once corporations figure out that it is cheaper and easier to get the competition banned and them mandated, than to create new products; and that they can make lots of money as the sole provider of a crappy product but not that much making good products in a competitive market; well, lets just say that the campagne contributions flow…

He goes on with:

Corporations are very happy under a Socialist Third Way / Progressive / Market Socialism / Fascist / “Government regulated Coopetition” (whatever you name you like to apply to the same beast) system. They are not very happy with wide open competitive markets. See all of Europe for an example of “Managed Markets” (yet another name…) The French are masters of this technique, and the Germans not far behind. The Japanese innovated the Keiretsu as a way to limit competition to manageable chunks with government supervision.

Like I said, it DOES work. What galls me is just that we run around putting 20 different names on the same process and that just hides what’s really going on. All for political reasons. Very “un-tidy”… You’d think these folks had something to hide…

At any rate, I’d like our economy to move back more toward a “Mixed Economy” with less of it “regulated and rescued” and be a bit further from a Lange Type Socialism and more like the Socialism Lite we used to be. Somehow some folks think that means I want laissez faire (which is prone to other evil failures); even more folks think Corporations must be laissez faire machines and tools of the Evil Right Wing; when the reality is that they are much more useful to the Third Way Socialists of the world… and make much more stable profits under them.

Big Business, Big Pharma, Big Banks. They no longer compete for business. They buy government.

Here is just one example from a recent post of mine. Pharmaceutical Company Supports Cannabis Prohibition To Protect Its Profits.

Kinda makes you want to vote for Trump don’t it? He might not be any better. He certainly will be no worse. And I like his choice of enemies.