“Most Americans are taught in school that fascism is a ruthless one party dictatorship, the most popular example being Nazi Germany. This is a misconception. Fascism is a political economy, not merely a political system that existed in one moment of history. Fascism, as defined by Black revolutionary and assassinated political prisoner George Jackson, is the complete control of the state by monopoly capital. Fascism is the last stage of capitalism in the heart of the US imperial center where the relationship between the state and corporation becomes indiscernible.  A difficult, but necessary, task for the left in this period is to acknowledge that fascism is the system of rule in the United States.

-Danny Haiphong

Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign might as well be called “At Least I’m Not Donald Trump.” I keep asking her supporters every where I go for a list of the reasons why I should vote for her, and every single time I hear, “Do you want Donald Trump?” Well, no, I don’t. But neither do I want Hillary Clinton. I have not one good reason to vote for that woman. Not one. I see absolutely no redeeming qualities. Nor do I want to see the First Molester in the White House again. But that’s another story for another time.

Do I think Donald Trump is a fascist? I think he’s an ignorant buffoon first, then a fascist. However, I really hate to tell all the fear mongers out there the truth about of this fascist stuff. We don’t need Donald Trump to make us a fascist state. In fact, Donald Trump exists because we already are a fascist state. No matter how hard you try to kid yourselves, we no longer live in a functional Democracy. The reality of our situation is that fascism is built on an economy where the relationship between the state and corporation becomes indistinguishable. We’re already at that state.

No sir. Donald Trump is not going to be advent of fascism in America. He’s the next step. We’re already in serious trouble, but he’s not the most trouble we have. He’s a distraction. I will say it again: He’s a distraction from the real issues the majority of American people face every single day.

There are fourteen “warning signs” of fascism. If you’ve got some of these, you know you’re in trouble. If you have all of these, you’re absolutely screwed. Whether Americans want to hear it or not, we’ve touched on all of these warning signals of fascism. I mean, 9-11 was the perfect historical event at the perfect time. It allowed the politicians and their puppet masters to make great strides in fascist state building.

Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. We’ve got a fair amount of this. The big scandal at the Democratic convention? The Wikileaks dump? Perish the thought. Not enough flags! At least that’s what their set up men in the GOP said. Not to worry. The Dems fixed that little problem the next night. Our elected officials have been wearing flag lapel pins since September 11, 2001, and if you’re not wearing one you’re treasonous. All that bi-partisan unity stuff that was done to “make us safer” is another good example.

Disdain for the importance of human rights. Nobody can ever accuse the United States of caring much about the human rights of our neighbors in the Middle East. Hillary Clinton didn’t have a problem taking $25 million from Saudi Arabia in spite of its dismal record on women’s rights and LGBT rights, and the fact that it funds terrorism. Nobody here is certainly worrying about the thousands upon thousands of innocent women and children who are being killed, injured or displaced by our misguided foreign policies. Do you see us holding ourselves accountable when we mistakenly drone bomb wedding parties or hospitals? I don’t think anybody from Obama on down to Hillary Clinton are losing any sleep over this stuff.

Obama’s record on civil liberties was already being viewed as dismal after his first term. It hasn’t gotten any better. His war on whistleblowers and his domestic spying program prove he has little regard for our civil rights either.

Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. We’re good on this one too. We’ve got plenty of people who will happily blame our dismal economic status on immigrants instead of the one percenters and their corporate boot-licking politicians who are really the cause of our problems. And damned near every problem we have is caused by a Muslim, because that is the blather that our pundits and politicians keep feeding what is — at best — a naive, uninformed citizenry .

And I’m sure with all this election distraction you’ve not been paying attention to the extensive efforts being made by the present administration (Yes, a Democratic administration.) to revive the Cold War. It’s a dangerous game we are playing. It would be one thing if the politicians were the only ones who would fry, but that isn’t the case. There are no winners in this war. The Democrats even had the gall to accuse the Russians of interfering with our elections with the release of the DNC Wikileaks. The Russians didn’t hack the DNC. And that isn’t the point anyway. The point is the rampant corruption in the Democratic Party.

The supremacy of the military/avid militarism.  I dare anybody to argue with this one. The Pentagon budget is well beyond bloated, and we answer every world conflict with warfare rather than diplomacy. We’re like the Yosemite Sam of world conflict. Our current president, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, is waging war in more nations now than George W. Bush did. And we though nobody could get worse than him. We have the hubris to believe that we can simply invade sovereign nations and overthrow their leadership, even if it has been democratically elected in their country, so that it benefits us. We rarely have a plan to help innocent people out after we’ve managed to decimate their nation. Hillary Clinton, as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, boasts a horrendous track record of making deals with the devil, harming the innocent and creating chaos.

In May of this year, on his visit to Hiroshima, Barack Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons. In fact, he took office eight years ago making the promise that he would significantly reduce the U.S. arsenal. He has decommissioned fewer than 400 nukes in all this time in office. If that isn’t enough, the new budget calls for the U.S. to spend $1 trillion upgrading our nuclear arsenal. That doesn’t sound like a world without nukes. Maybe he meant the rest of the world, just not Israel and the U.S. Again, this is all part of the Cold War game we are waging with Russia, no matter what Barack Obama tells you. We already know he’s a liar.

We have a presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton who considers Henry Kissinger, one of the worst war criminals in history, her mentor. She revealed he often advised her when she was Secretary of State (and, frankly, with the Middle East debacle, it shows).

The public is war weary. Unfortunately, the military-industrial complex is not.

Rampant sexism. This might not be apparent to many Americans (and no, I’m not talking about poor Hillary Clinton and her bogus claims of sexism), but women’s rights are under assault within the states and have been eroding with nary a peep being made by our elected officials. That’s because the neolibs running the DNC don’t give a shit about social issues and, because they don’t give a shit, they aren’t going to do much more than pay lip service to defending women’s rights either. On the Republican side of the aisle, however, they are as bigoted and sexist as they have always been. They always seem to lead the charge to roll back any advances minorities may have made.

A controlled mass media. You can’t get much more controlled than it is here in America today. Please, take the time out to thank Bill Clinton for that with his Telecommunications Act of 1996. He made parasites like Rupert Murdoch possible. This chart may be a bit dated (2011), but you get the idea. Things have not changed much, except now we can add National Geographic Magazine to the News Corp column.

The dialogue is controlled by the government and, like good partners in crime, the corporations who own our media comply by feeding us only what is politically expedient for us to know. They are not interested in an informed public, and the news outlets are not interested in employing investigative journalists. All they want to employ are talking heads who can look good on camera while regurgitating news written for them by those who control information.

Obsession with national security. This is more than evident today. In fact, we suspended civil rights with the Patriot Act with the excuse being our safety. It was nothing of the sort. Every single thing the government does that is an affront to our civil liberties is done so under the mantra of the bogus war on terror, a terrorism that we ourselves created to advance this end. Obama was going to protect whistleblowers. Remember that? He forgot to tell us that he’d only protect them if they weren’t blowing the whistle on him. That’s all that Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden did. There was no treason involved. Yet, they have been portrayed by the politicians and the lamestream media alike as unpatriotic. Both are both charged under the espionage act for exposing the Obama administration for the fraud that it is, and nothing more than that.

This administration has been fixated on national security, having prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations in history combined, until Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Even though Clinton showed extreme “carelessness” and “recklessness” with state secrets, James Comey found a way to spin an excuse for Clinton. It was time to rally around the party and provide cover. However, further analysis of why Comey’s logic doesn’t stand up only proves that there are two systems of justice in this nation. One for the elites and one for the peasants.

Religion and the ruling elite tied together. I think it’s pretty evident how religion is used as a political weapon in this nation. The GOP is continually trying to oppress one minority or another under the guise of their existence compromising someone else’s religious beliefs. It happens every day here in America. We have religious figures from a variety of beliefs dabbling in government, even going so far as to donate millions of dollars to influence legislation.

Power of the corporations is protected. You’ve got that right. We’re very good at this here. The people want their food labeled so that they know what they’re eating, but that’s an inconvenience for the corporations who don’t want the people to know, so it simply doesn’t happen. Citizens United made it legal for corporations to buy our elections outright. Trade agreements, like NAFTA and TPP are basically an affront to our Democracy, yet our leaders create these agreements with the help of corporations and without input from the American people. Today, Americans pay a disproportionate amount of taxes, while many corporations pay no federal taxes at all. I don’t know how much more protected the corporations can be, but we’re about to find out over the next four years.

Power of labor is suppressed or eliminated. Again, NAFTA and TPP are examples of this, and there are other trade agreements in the pipeline. The bogus “right to work” laws that are being passed on a state-by-state basis are nothing more than laws that negate the power of organized labor while catering to the desires of corporate America. These laws have had negative effects on wages, working conditions and health care, and restrict worker protections.

Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. This is a tricky one here. There are some of these characteristics that cross over into others. Education is one where this happens. It’s evident that corporations now write our curriculum at all levels of the educational system. The Gates Foundation has many tentacles. It isn’t just a foundation that hands out money and tells people to use it for educational purposes. The father of one of my son’s eighth grade teachers wrote curriculum for the Gates Foundation. These are business people, not teachers, who are writing curriculum in a way that would benefit a business but not necessarily an individual. There is no part of our society where corporations have not infiltrated. You can be sure that “critical thinking” and “questioning authority” are not big in this kind of curriculum.

As for the arts, the relationship really has evolved. Oppression used to be the tactic. Now, politicians and entertainers have become one. They simply have figured out how they both can prosper at the expense of the citizenry. We have George and Amal Clooney hosting a multi-million-dollar dinner for the Hillary Victory Fund that even Clooney admitted was for obscene amounts of money. It is reported that Clinton earned $15 million that night. But it didn’t stop him from holding the fundraiser, did it? No. It is reported that Elton John has given Clinton somewhere between $5 and $10 million over her political career. Carole King has been all over the country headlining fundraisers for Clinton. The list goes on and on. No need to oppress anymore. Both sides reap the benefits, but it seems that very little is genuine. It is reported that Clinton paid Katy Perry for her endorsement. And Sarah Silverman was a rabid supporter of Bernie Sanders. That is, up until the Democratic Convention when it was time for her to move on and keep herself in the limelight by cuddling up to Clinton and calling the Sanders’ supporters we are being “ridiculous.” What is ridiculous is any average American putting any real stock into endorsements offered by the Hollywood elites.

Obsession with crime and punishment. This portion of the fascist program really began to ramp up under Bill Clinton. His crime bill resulted in an explosion of the U.S. prison population, with a disproportionate number of poor, mentally ill and people of color paying the price. The war on terror has brought us “indefinite detention.” Police departments have been given military arms, as well as unprecedented power to uphold the law. The police, in many cases, function as judge, jury and executioner. This is being played out right now on the streets of American cities where the police are displaying a shoot now, think later mentality, particularly with the African-American community. This has spurred the rise of groups such as Black Lives Matter, and rightfully so.

Rampant cronyism and corruption. We’ve really got this one covered.  Corporate America and government enjoy a revolving-door relationship that is often at the expense of we the people. We employ a system of pay-to-play politics, where Wall Street, the banks and the billionaires are granted access to our elected officials and favorable outcomes on legislation in return for hefty election donations.

Leaked documents show that the DNC kept a list of the biggest campaign donors and hoped to reward them with key appointments to commissions and federal boards.

Fraudulent elections. In the 2016 Democratic primary leaked memos showed collusion between the DNC hierarchy, the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media to push the nomination in Clinton’s favor. The rigging of this campaign stands out because of its in-your-face nature. The Democrats barely worked to conceal their outright corruption, with ballots being left uncounted and packed in back rooms, voter registrations being switched, polling locations shut down, video evidence of votes being cast then disappearing, and the cancellation of election polling. In another country, this primary would be thrown out and a re-vote taken.

Yes, the DNC dumped their sacrificial lamb in Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Since then, three others have resigned, including CEO Amy Dacey. But this is all for show. It’s not about the individuals, stupid. It’s about the systemic corruption problem in the party itself. This is nothing more than a band aid designed to keep the masses from revolting.

Beware those creating fear, uncertainty and doubt

Am I saying that I want Donald Trump for president? No. I’m not. However, neither do I want Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office. Not under any circumstance. I suggest to you that those creating all of this fear are simply people who want to maintain the status quo. They are either benefiting from the system, or they are too afraid to make any real change. Donald Trump is far from the biggest problem we have in America, and those telling you he’ll turn us into a fascist nation are being melodramatic. We’re already a fascist nation.

Yes, Donald Trump’s talk about building a wall is disturbing. More disturbing for me, however, is the fact that Hillary Clinton actually voted in favor of building a wall as Senator from New York. Donald Trump’s attitude toward deportation may be un-American, but Hillary Clinton’s history on this subject has been no better. Finally, those who think Donald Trump would be dangerous with our military might want to take a good look at Clinton’s interventionist and regime-changing history. Does she have more experience? Yes. But that’s not what it’s all about when all of the experience you have is based on poor judgement that has caused unnecessary death and destruction around the globe.

Categories: 2016, Anti-Immigrant, Civil Liberties, Elections, fascism

Tags: corruption, Democrats, DNC, election fraud, elections, fascism, GOP