Let me tell you about fucking fascism… friend. For a long time in my country it was considered very bad form indeed to drop the “F-bomb” in discussions of our nation’s politics. “Fascism” was bloody serious business, and we were never to make such comparisons lightly.
Of course, George W. Bush made America’s fascist tendencies obvious. The entire world saw it: election-rigging, torturing, civilian-raping, nation-invading, journalist-murdering, systemically racist, corporation-exalting fascism. But here, in America, we kept to the old rule: mum was the word (not “fascism”). No matter what Bush or any of his predecessors did, it was still verboten to call it by its true name.
So we politely refrained.
Only today, the old prohibition is off! We now have an oafish, orange galoot of a president who many Americans feel comfortable calling a “FASCIST.” After a year-plus of our warmongering corporate media equating Donald Trump with fascism, the etiquette of using the “F-word” has apparently changed.
Our relentlessly propagandistic press also calls Donald Trump the dupe of Russia — “Putin’s puppet” — ironically, for NOT wanting another conflict based on a bunch of evidence-free CIA claptrap. (He’s apparently a “dangerous fascist” for resisting the neo-McCarthyite establishment’s push for World War III — or, at the very least, a new Cold War.)
We denigrate Trump relentlessly — pushing him toward his most fascist potential, ironically — but here’s the unvarnished truth about the political reality of today’s America: AMERICAN FASCISM WAS ON ITS KNEES when President Obama came into office… and he gave it a lifeline, with few conditions or restraints.
Barack Obama simply used the dwindling immensity of our nation’s wealth, created by our labor, to needlessly prop up our mortal enemies, the fascist oligarchs and their predatory, infinitely destructive corporatocracy. Allowing them to rob the most vulnerable among us, especially people of color, President Obama put the “savvy businessmen” who promise to be History’s Worst Fascists back in charge, while committing a trillion dollars to the development of NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS and further militarizing our institutionally racist police… while repealing Posse Comitatus (with the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act). And also repealing the law prohibiting government psy-ops against Americans at home (the Smith-Mundt Act). And he effectively retired habeas corpus… a HUMONGOUS betrayal of the “Hope and Change” he ran on.
Obama elevated several of the worst (if not the most renowned) Bush-era TORTURE proponents and empowered “Dubya’s” bloodiest, most ruthless generals, Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus: responsible for extraordinary crimes against humanity, including the torture of thousands of innocent Iraqis and the ETHNOSECTARIAN CLEANSING of the vast majority of Baghdad’s Sunnis (a result of Bush’s 2007 “Troop Surge”). Ultimately, President Obama would allow the neocon agenda — discredited and adrift when he became president — to expand to several countries, butchering hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East and beyond, and creating over 65 million refugees. A new world record.
But what else should we have expected? President Obama let a Citigroup executive, implicated in the massive fraud that collapsed the U.S. economy (Michael Froman), select his first cabinet. This rather sizable betrayal of the American people explains why Obama elevated his appalling predecessors’ top people, some of the rottenest apples from the administrations of both Clinton and Bush, to senior-level positions in his administration.
Finally, putting the icing on the democracy-poisoning cake, Obama helped Wall Street’s favorite world-fracking warmongers RIG the 2016 Democratic Primary* against the best people’s candidate in generations, on behalf of an enormously unpopular and deeply corrupt candidate — ensuring that the left would not be able to rise again in America.
And that’s why I think Barack Obama was such a monumental failure, in terms of his presidency. He had the entire country behind him in 2009, and a mandate like no other, to reverse the country’s fascist plunge — and a filibuster-proof DEMOCRATIC SUPER-MAJORITY in Congress to make it happen! And all the evidence showed that if he didn’t act, we were basically screwed, along with the oceans, bees, and Great Barrier Reef.
But he sided with the fascists instead, on every issue, right down the line, under no public pressure from the opposition (aggressively pushing for the dreadful and extremely unpopular Trans-Pacific Partnership “trade” pact, for instance). In doing so, he made it possible in 2016 for the GOP and Donald Trump to capitalize on the country’s anti-war, anti-Wall Street sentiment and re-take the White House.
And the 21st-century Democratic Party now stands with the neocons, pushing Trump toward WAR. (Mostly because they’ve become a party of MIC corporatists, but also because they desperately needed a distraction from the stolen primary* and an excuse for losing the most winnable election in modern memory: “Vladimir Putin Hacked the Election!” has turned out to be as credible as “The Dog Ate My Homework!”)
This is our history: After accumulating more power every decade, the democracy-loathing, climate-destroying, Arab/Muslim-slaughtering, humanity-enslaving fascists had finally cracked up under Bush — dashed upon the rocks by their own hubris. They were lying on the ground, convulsing to death, when Barack Obama performed a miracle of triage, stealthily handing them $16 trillion of our wealth and zealously championing their agenda, putting their boots back on our throats: crushing Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Flint, MI, Wisconsin unions, and the Standing Rock Sioux; mounting one foreign coup after another; and prosecuting more whistleblowers and journalists under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined… ultimately giving us President Trump.
And if hadn’t been Trump, it would’ve been someone worse… like Ted Cruz. (In truth, Donald Trump, despite his shameful demagoguery and frequently boorish behavior, was the clear liberal in the 2016 GOP primary, vigorously denouncing slavery-permitting, corporation-exalting “trade” pacts and the neocons’ insane, warmongering agenda — and defending not just “New York values” but also entitlements, Glass-Steagall, and Planned Parenthood!)
But neoliberalism is virtually guaranteed to bring pure, unadulterated fascism to America, sooner or later. (Turns out to be sooner, because with the Democrats’ help, the MIC’s fascists are co-opting Trump’s presidency more, every day: ATTACK SYRIA, PROVOKE RUSSIA, CONFRONT CHINA — NOW, NOW, NOW!!!)
But in order for America to work, we need conservatives and actual liberals in positions of power — not conservatives and “neo-” liberals (soulless technocrats, like Presidents Clinton and Obama, who simply do the dirty work of mass-murdering tyrants, without so much as a second thought).
We need actual fucking LIBERALS. (Now, there’s a word that needs reclaiming!)
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* RE: The massive evidence of election fraud determining the “winner” of the 2016 “Democratic” Primary:
If you have any doubts about the evidence of election fraud in the Democratic Primary, I would point you to months of excellent coverage from The Young Turks and Debbie Lusignan, the Sane Progressive, which — along with the Des Moines Register (the conservative daily that endorsed Clinton) and other news sites that detailed, blow by blow, evidence that one state after another was rigged and hijacked in a very opaque and dirty tricks-marred process. Also, the excellent journalist Greg Palast was recently interviewed by TYT’s Jordan Chariton, and he was unequivocal about evidence of election fraud in the primary.
Beyond these few sources I’ve mentioned, I can give you chapter and verse of what went wrong in Iowa, Nevada, Massachusetts, Arizona, New York, Illinois, and Rhode Island, to name just a few places where the rigging was so blatant that hearings were held because citizens protested in droves, and election officials ended up being fired.
We should also take note of the frequent conspicuous disparities in the exit polls. In other countries when exit polls are this far off (between five and thirteen points in about a dozen states), the laws in those countries trigger automatic hand recounts. In other nations, when results are this fishy, the international community (including the U.S.) has demanded hand recounts under international monitors.
FYI, I don’t fault most Americans for not knowing all of this; I follow news like some people follow sports. I have archives of hundreds of hours of video and literally thousands of articles — and I’ve read (and heavily annotated) a great many of the most critically acclaimed books on the subject. From where I’m standing, I have no doubt whatsoever that the Florida 2000 presidential election was rigged and stolen for George Bush. I am equally certain that the Democratic Primary was rigged and stolen for Sec. Clinton, because I watched it happen in real-time. In short, I would bet my life and soul that the case I’m making is absolutely true: millions of Americans were disenfranchised, hundreds of thousands saw their registrations flipped, hundreds of thousands were purged from the rolls, and untold numbers were simply barred from voting because 66-75% of precincts were arbitrarily closed, disproportionately in college towns and areas were Sen. Sanders was expected to clobber Clinton. Amid great mainstream criticism, states like Iowa have refused to release raw vote totals, making opacity the rule of the day.
Please trust that I’ve taken the time to watch the hearings that took place in Maricopa County (AZ) and Chicago, IL. I’ve heard the citizens’ first-hand accounts of how they personally witnessed the outcome-changing actions of corrupt officials; these stories are stunning and extremely compelling. These everyday Americans are reasonable, credible, and obviously intelligent and principled.
Finally, don’t YOU find it extremely suspicious that all of Clinton’s must-win states were marred with controversy? How obvious does it have to be, aside from all that’s been documented, when elections officials have been fired in case after case (scapegoats/sacrificial lambs, protecting the system itself). How much more do you need than the fact that in Bernie’s home state (NY), hundreds of thousands of voters were simply purged from the rolls, just prior to the primary, including over 125,000 in Bernie’s home borough, Brooklyn, where he was born and raised? (And then there’s the documented, widely reported, money laundering of the DNC and efforts made by DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and her staff, to do everything possible, legal or not, to advantage Clinton and hamstring Sanders, including with smears and rat-f’g lies, dirty, dirty tricks. There’s a reason Ms. Wasserman-Schultz was forced to resign from her job and left her position scandalized and despised.)