I didn't know how to title this rant, but it's a PDR original...George Carlin once said that when facism came to America, it would not be dressed in tan suits and boots, but rather with a suit and tie. As right as he was, his tense was speculative, and when he said this, the process had long begun. Facism isn't just using brute force to promote intolerance or dictators. It's a special form of economic coordination between the government and the major players in the business community -- namely corporations and unions.
Facism in that traditional sense first came to the United States in the form of the New Deal. But as the men in the back room quickly learned, the New Deal wasn't doing anything to halt the Depression. Enter World War II and Germany, another government using facism to revive a crumbling economy. Things really took off from there. We became a command economy, with the government at the helm. We had wage controls, price controls, allocations of materials...all under the dication of Washington and the corporate executives it teamed with.
Sooner or later, the war ended, but the idea that spawned the New Deal was still viewed as the answer -- pouring public funds into the economy worked. This is where the debate splintered -- should that public money be funneled through military spending or social spending? How should the fascism operate? But make no mistake about it...there was no debate on the newfound American truth that
pouring public funds into the economy by way of facism worked. From that point we'd basically leveraged ourselves into the economic giant of the world, or, more specifically, we became the world's bank. Our dollar became the global reserve currency - it was tied to gold, and the world was tied to it. So long as we continued to counter our rough times with a fusion of public loot, we would benefit like most advanced economies before us.
And then came Nixon.
The difference between Vietnam and WWII is that after '68, corporate and public America weren't getting behind it. A war without the mobilization of the economy becomes a deficit-spending war. Vietnam began to cause stangation and a devaluing of our dollar. Japan and Europe began to profit off of mobilizing their industry for our wars.
Nixon panicked. He took away what remained of the gold standard, raised import duties and completely obliterated what our economy had been thriving on since WWII. In the aftermath, speculation became the new king, speculative millions and billions and trillions were zoomed all across the world overnight. The old rule book was no longer the Bible.
Fast forward to Reagan, who in an effort to fix a nosediving economy, successfully implements the historically sound method of mobilized military spending. The Red Scare is used to subsidize everything from the airlines to the tech industries. Reagan's Cold War was a disguised New Deal. He had learned that it's far easier and more successful to infuse the economy with the people's money when it was an objective that couldn't be questioned. Star Wars wasn't a military program at all, but rather a subsidy for technology companies.
And like WWII, it worked like a charm. Reagan saved the economy by once again shoveling public funds into the economy through the mobilization of defense and military spending. H.W. Bush found his own skirmishes to keep milking the situation until Clinton came along, when something a bit unprecedented happened...Reagan had used tax money to fund all sorts of technological developments that were gaining steam rapidly...only now there was the added aspect of a wildly speculative economic climate brought on by Nixon. The bubble is born.
Clinton guides the reigns he's been handed masterfully, keeping up with the the proven military spending but adding a dash of social spending. Under his watch the speculation monster grows wildly. It's nearing a brink.
Cue President Cheney and 9/11.
Cheney knows the game, and invents the enemy. We subsidize all sorts of struggling business ventures with a massive influx of public funds under the guise of a 'war on terror'. Trillions are thrown at no bid contracts, and subsidies for rebuilding Iraq and handed to corporations left and right. He wants to be his hero Reagan, but there's a tragic flaw here -- Reagan's tax decreases werren't a good idea in the light of his massive military spending. His saving grace on that one was the technology boom that it had spawned.
Not only does Cheney not have that safety net, but this speculative market has been allowed to fester and mutate to the point where our nation and population are comprimised almost
entirely in speculative wealth. The war loses it's mobilization and we're back to the guns and butter of Vietnam. We are no longer the world's banker. China is. And to make a perfect storm, the speculative wealth has dried up.
Enter Obama. He has decided to go back to the old playbook and bring out his version of the New Deal. He is keeping the 'War On Terror' percolating, but has decided to shift the focus back to social spending. In my best estimation, he will soon realize that it's simply not enough. It took about seven years for us to realize after the New Deal. Sooner or later, he will have to find an enemy for the corporations and people to rally behind...
...and by then China might be starting to ask for some of their money back.
