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On Friday I was in Washington for a meeting with Administration officials. In the course of that meeting, they requested that I “step aside” as CEO of GM, and so I have.
The above is on the General Motors website. Since when, in a system of free enterprise, does the government pick CEOs for companies? Well, it doesn't. This is just the latest move deeper into fascism.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
-- Benito Mussolini
Ridiculous, I can hear many say. Obama is no Mussolini. True, ours is not yet the full blown dictatorship that Italy had back then.
Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans who have been working to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our nation’s greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination, all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers, with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society.
— John T. Flynn, As We Go Marching [1944]
The problem is we adopt more and more parts of the fascist agenda everyday it seems. Ours is a form of fascism that might best be described as elected fascism. The leaders change, the form remains.
Some excellent reading on the subject:
Economic Fascism
When people hear the word “fascism” they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s as “corporatism,” that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a “model” by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe. A version of economic fascism was in fact adopted in the United States in the 1930s and survives to this day. In the United States these policies were not called “fascism” but “planned capitalism.” The word fascism may no longer be politically acceptable, but its synonym “industrial policy” is as popular as ever.
(snip)
