Is America Likely to Become a Fascist State?

Increasingly the term “fascist” is being used as Donald Trump’s hate mongering propels him to a commanding (insurmountable?) lead in the Republican Party’s presidential primary race. Why is this happening?

The Republicans have nothing to offer for the improvement of ordinary people’s lives. Indeed, they only make things worse when they pursue presidential power in order to increase the flow of money to the wealthy.

This absence of value for the common citizen means they must seek the votes they need by some other means. In this country, as in so many other democracies, that “means” is fear. Fear not only provides a highly effective way to control a society, it also is good business for the wealthy as they peddle arms to the domestic masses, as well as globally to warring states and factions thereof. This process occurs, I repeat, because the Republicans have nothing of substance to better the lives of the people. Do they display any effort to improve the income of ordinary people? Do they seek to provide better public education? Do they seek to mitigate the economic and social inequality of this country? None of it!  And it should be made clear to every citizen. The Republicans have nothing to offer the majority of Americans except fear and anxiety.

This gross failure to meet the needs of the majority of Americans is the central fact surrounding the presidential politics in 2016.

The Republicans, increasingly under the leadership of Donald Trump, are prepared to use this situation to promote fascism. The Democratic Party, while at this stage less virulent, under the massive influence of Wall Street is little better than the Republicans in addressing the needs of ordinary Americans.

This country is in bad shape. We need to recognize the danger our current political process has and is placing us in. The major danger we face is not ISIS, but is the fear of ISIS and the malevolence of those who are trying to turn that fear into mass xenophobia of all that is different and to create a garrison state and the tyranny that goes with it. It happened in Germany using fear of the Jews.

There is an antidote. It is called Bernie Sanders, who sees the staggering economic inequality of this country and its social deprivations.  He sees the means and has the will to address it. For a raft of reasons, the grip of the wealthy on this country must be broken. That wealth should be used to create an economy of widely distributed wealth, in which money is constantly turning over, creating additional wealth instead of lying dormant in the bank accounts of the wealthy in the Cayman Islands.

It is clear to me that we are at the critical point at which we either let money, which we can neither eat nor drink, rule us from the megabanks of Wall Street or we take people and their welfare as the focus of our society. Money with no purpose but to create more money is a deadly social vice that will corrupt and misguide any democracy that succumbs to it.  David Korten calls this wealth “phantom wealth” because it is not connected to any reality. This is the wealth of speculation, in which money is its own commodity.

Money is power, and concentrated money is concentrated power. Unfortunately, the power of this speculative wealth, having no necessary attachment to the real world, creates an unpredictable and capricious source of great power. This power can result in overspeculation responsible for recessions, depressions, and even war, which finds its roots in the crushing poverty of such economic disasters.

 We see this kind of wealth on display in Donald Trump. His wealth alone made him a viable candidate for President of the United States. He focuses on the fault lines of American society by pitting one group against another, promoting economic and social inequality, and making one of the most powerful nations on earth “great again.” This is the practice and language of fascism. We must stop the insanity we see in Trump and the deluded masses that follow him. We need to make America work for everybody, not just the wealthy.

Bob Newhard

Once In a Lifetime

In an article titled 10 Reasons I'm Only Voting for Bernie Sanders and Will Not Support Hillary Clinton, Huffington Post author H. A. Goodman gives as his tenth reason for voting for Bernie , Bernie 

Sanders is a "once in a lifetime candidate."

 I could not agree more. However this declaration reminded me of an earlier such opportunity the American people had and the consequences of electoral defeat.

In the 1944 election we lost a “once in a lifetime” presidential candidate. Henry A. Wallace was Vice President, chosen for that office by Franklin Roosevelt because of his stellar performance as FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture and Wallace’s popularity therein during the agricultural crises of the 1930’s such as the dustbowl and massive soil erosion.

As an example, Wallace and other soil scientists knew that soil erosion was due, in substantial measure, to the American farmer’s practice of plowing in straight furrows, which let rainwater run straight down the sides of hills resulting in soil erosion. Contour plowing, following the contour of the land, would greatly reduce this runoff. When Wallace tried to persuade American farmers to adopt contour plowing he and his scientists were scoffed at. These farmers knew from long tradition that the straight row was the way plowing should be done. Indeed farmers evaluated each other in term so the straightness of their furrows.

So Wallace took a piece of land of common fertility, contour plowed it and planted his corn. His crop of corn that fall was so much greater than that of adjacent fields that farmers began to adopt contour plowing. This is an example of Wallace’s way of administrating. Rather than ordering farmers to change a deeply rooted traditional practice in order to prevent an ever increasing loss of arable land, he chose to persuade by example.

Wallace was a visionary who revolutionized agricultural practices in this country and enjoyed wide respect in Europe and Russia. He was one of the world’s most renowned agronomists, especially in hybridization. He was a noted mathematician. Most importantly, his view of the post-World War II world was people-focused. Unlike Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, who declared that the 20^th century would be the American century, Wallace in one of his most famous speeches declared and demonstrated why the 20^th century would be the century of the common man.

One more observation; Henry Wallace was a man of peace. War was an absolute last resort. To confirm this one need only read his speech titled The Way To Peace, delivered in late 1946 as he saw the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR starting to take shape. About the time Churchill was delivering his March 1946 Iron Curtain speech, soaked in hostility, Wallace was delivering a speech on how to obtain peace. Interestingly, Wallace began his speech by observing that war prompted a lot of excitement in human beings. Peace did not. There were, for example no parades celebrating peace as there were celebrating war. How many politicians would have begun a speech on peace by observing a fundamental conflict in human nature, especially, at a time so proximate to the most destructive war mankind had ever seen and the looming prospect of conflict with the Soviet Union.

Given the above characteristic, and many more such in a Vice President, why did Roosevelt select Harry Truman to be his running mate in the election of 1944? In what documentary film maker Oliver Stone called Roosevelt’s worst decision, FDR succumbed to pressure from the business segment of the Democratic Party that feared a Wallace presidency, should FDR’s illness prove fatal, because of Wallace’s efforts to revitalize a somewhat moribund New Deal. Southern Democrats were also well represented in those who pressured FDR to dump Wallace for the little known and administratively inexperienced Harry Truman.

As Peter Dreier portrays in his Truthout article titled Henry Wallace, America's Forgotten Visionary, the consequences of the decision to replace Wallace resulted in  the dropping of the atomic bombs, which Wallace would never have done (see Henry Wallace Would Never Have Dropped the Bomb on Japan by Robert L. Baker in the Executive Intelligence Review) and the pursuit of a Cold War with the Soviet Union, which Wallace would not have pursued. I strongly recommend reading the Henry Wallace, America's Forgotten Visionary article to get a clear understanding of how deeply politics can matter.

My primary objective in writing the above account of Henry Wallace’s virtues and fate is to draw attention to the analogy it has to our current situation and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders.

In Sanders we have a “once in a lifetime” candidate. The Democratic Party establishment, especially its business sector, not to mention the corporate media, is trying to suborn Bernie’s candidacy. We are faced with an entangled web of Middle East wars, the prospect of endless war and the militarization of domestic policing that it has spawned. As post World War II America and the world so badly needed Wallace so we equally need Bernie Sanders.  We must recognize the gravity of our situation and the imperative of getting Bernie elected. This time we must not let it end in failure.

Bob Newhard

Reflections on Veterans Day

Going through my e-mail this Veterans Day morning I was swamped with message after message urging me to thank a veteran, remember a veteran, or express my appreciation of and gratitude for veterans. Most of these e-mails were from progressive groups opposed to endless war, American imperialism, war crimes, and a militaristic foreign policy, not to mention the budgetary consequences of said militarism. Why is it, I asked myself, that progressives who condemn American militarism, are so grateful to those who implement and carry out these very policies and practices?

The convenient piece of ethical doggerel is that we cannot expect soldiers to be responsible for the wars in which they kill and maim. They must take orders from those society deems their superiors. This argument might even hold water when we had the draft. Even then a common protest mantra was “What if they had a war and no one came?” As conscientious objectors became objects of abuse there was flight to Canada. The point is that these days there is absolutely no excuse for serving the aggression of an imperialistic state, which launches unprovoked attacks and subjects prisoners and its own citizens to torture. Yet, we are told to honor the veterans who visited these horrors on enemy and civilian alike.

These are the self-deceptions and their brutal consequences of a mindless, hype-saturated, highly delusional society after 14 years (and counting) of continuous war.

Somebody has to break this highly destructive cycle. Progressives, with their concern for human welfare, should be the countervailing force. That they are not is testament to the power of societal brainwashing.

Even Bernie Sanders has refused to connect the dots. He is against our endless wars, yet he prides himself on his record of supporting veterans’ assistance. Even he will not publicly ask himself whether volunteering for military service to imperialism should be a cause for honor and concern.

A democracy is ultimately governed by its people. This means that citizens of a democracy have a responsibility to evaluate evidence just as those whom they elect to carry out their wishes are expected to weigh all the consequences of their decisions. Submitting ourselves to continuous conventional propaganda instead of looking at things as they are, obviously results in unacknowledged crime and violence.

I realize the above argument expects a high level of citizen responsibility, but with the future we have before us, the unprecedented threats to humanity and its continued existence require unprecedented actions on the part of humanity. The response we must undertake in dealing with these, makes child’s play of changing our attitudes regarding war and those that fight them.

Bob  Newhard 

Bashing Bernie - Uncouth

One of the more fascinating things about this presidential campaign is how the attacks on Bernie Sanders so frequently reflect the hand of corporate America.

The latest attack on Bernie is that he shouted at Hillary. According to some of the media Bernie is, in general, a loud mouthed boorish and uncouth individual. The implication is, of course, that Hillary is a lady and speaks in a softer more refined, voice. While this has nothing to do with Bernie’s focus on the gross inequality in this society and the responsibility of Wall Street for that condition, it is intended to portray Bernie as uncouth.

This alleged low-class behavior psychologically segues to the working class whose interests Bernie promotes and to his Brooklyn background. Madison Avenue, from which Hillary is drawing her campaign strategy, has long studied the cultural memes in the American public mind and is well-versed in the prejudices that lie there. 

In sum, by simply implying that a lower class man from a working class background has offended a wealthy society lady, one of the old political games, Hillary’s campaign managers are attempting to convert the social issue of gross inequality into a personal issue.

The extent to which Hillary Clinton is relying on the marketing expertise of Madison Avenue and Wall Street is indicated in the following article. It reports that Hillary has added to her advisory staff two marketing experts to rebrand Hillary for the 2016 presidential race. One of these experts manages the Coca Cola brand for a major advertising firm. Her specialty is reviving old brands in danger of becoming passé. Please google the article’s title to get an appreciation of the depth of the shallowness that pervades the American political process and how irrelevant it makes that process to mankind’s unprecedented problems. The article’s title is The making of Hillary 5.0: Marketing wizards help re-imagine Clinton brand.

It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast between Democratic presidential candidates than Hillary’s focus on politics as advertising and Bernie’s focus on eliminating the major sources of human deprivation that untrammeled wealth is visiting upon the American people and the rest of the world.

Bob Newhard

On the Bases for Morality

In his speech to the students and faculty of Liberty University, Bernie Sanders continued his education of the American public mind. Bernie sought to find common ground with his audience through a shared concern for morality. If you recall, Jerry Falwell the founder and president of Liberty University , created his following under the rubric of the Moral Majority.

Bernie argued that justice is a fundamental moral concern rooted in the Golden Rule expressed in the Bible (Mathew 7.12) as  “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”       Issues such as the extreme wealth gap between the rich and the poor and the mass incarceration of young black men, are obvious examples of this moral injunction. Yet they are disregarded in favor of abortion and gay marriage as primary moral concerns.

I suggest that the reason for this is the difference in the foundations for morality. Morality founded on fictions such as those in religions founded on creation stories with their all-knowing and all-powerful god have no anchor in reality and can, therefore, become as fanciful as the human  imagination can make them. When those fancies are believed and motivate humans to behave in accordance with them, all hell can, and sometimes does, break loose. Moral issues founded on the human condition, such as Bernie’s concerns, are by that very fact more amenable to rational resolution than those founded on the arbitrariness of human fancy.

I believe Bernie knew what he was doing in his lecture to the students and faculty of Liberty University, namely, evidencing the difference in moral bases and helping those with a moral sentiment founded on the human condition to realize the difference. That he succeeded in some measure is evidenced by a post in Daily Kos by a student who heard Bernie’s speech and was impressed by it. It is not uncommon for young Americans to become religious as a vehicle for dealing with their moral concerns about the world. When those concerns are brought to religion they are often transfigured into the dogma of the religion. American society offers very little, other than religion, in which the burgeoning moral sentiment of the young can find expression. The sterility of our polical process does not solicit the moral engagement of the young. Bernie is changing some of that.

Once again, in my judgement Bernie was teaching people. A President of Bernie’s caliber would be a rare, if not unique, occurrence in American political leadership.

Bob Newhard