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I've been saying on here that the ever-growing connection between government and these corporations is closer to fascism than to communism (although I'm not saying it IS fascism, just closer). When I think of socialism or communism I think of huge social welfare programs, land reform, etc., not what is happening now.
well, fascist regimes, namely the Italian and the Nazi to some extent had pretty extensive social welfare programs, but I get your point. What I cannot get is how a lot of Americans don't publicly speak against this, yet label universal healthcare evil and "communist". The Americans are literally being stolen by the richest among the richest and they don't protest as they should. Free market as long as it good for corporations to fill their CEO's pockets, but when things get ugly, lets socialize their losses. In the meanwhile, millions of Americans struggle to pay their bills and a good chunk cannot afford healthcare, but implementing a more social system would be socialism. just gimme a break.
Sheenie, that's the question we should have asked before Czar Paulsen got his $750 billion checking account. I hope he saves some of the TARP for us middle class morons who the government and banking illumati begged us to use their credit cards, liar loans for our mortgages, and lease to "own" car payments.
These are the MBA's that are in charge of our future. What did my generation do to propagate this? What did we do?
I love how $25Billion bailout to the US auto industry is a call to communism and the evil behind those greedy union blue collar workers, but AIG before, and citi AFTER? No problem here's a gazillion dollars, you're too valuable to go through the "indignity" of the short end of the stick of capitalism.
Did Citigroup, AIG, and the many others that have taken "loans" (2 trillion?) from tax payers have a "business" plan? Otherwise... get back in line and come back once you have one.
Because they think Citi is "too big to fail". Also, I think because these banks are so cagey about their situation, it always gets down to the wire with these weekend crisis situations where the government has to come up with a solution within a matter of days or hours. So they make it up as they go along.
Yep, it ludicrous when these guys say they can't really determine how bad their balance sheets really are. They are admitting they are incompetent? Or they realize they are so bad, we would vomit when we knew how much bad risk they took.
I still say that the CDS stuff should all be declared illegal and unrecoverable unless it is backed by actual stock. Rip the lower intestines out of the shorts that are destroying the system and turn them into sausage on a fire.
What is currently happening, as someone else pointed out, is a slow nationalization of the banks. If the government said tomorrow "We are going to immediately nationalize all banking institutions," there would be H to pay. By doing it incrementally, no one can raise the red flag.
I've been saying on here that the ever-growing connection between government and these corporations is closer to fascism than to communism (although I'm not saying it IS fascism, just closer). When I think of socialism or communism I think of huge social welfare programs, land reform, etc., not what is happening now.
We're getting off-topic here, but I can't resist.
You are right, fascism is basically the marriage of corporate interests with government, which together control the factors of production and income, though, nominally at least, ownership remains private or mixed (but the corporate elite and the politicians are from one and the same class anyway), and the working population is controlled, with more or fewer welfare programs: remember that Mussolini was a school teacher with socialist ideas, and NAZI by name means nationalist socialist.
The difference between Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish fascism on the one hand, and Nazi fascism on the other, is that the former were not totalitarian, they did not try to control every aspect of people's thinking: those who criticized too loudly got beat up, those who stayed quiet were left alone to stagnate, at least economically.
Communism, on the other hand, means that the government legally owns the factors of production and distributes income, private property is illegal, and it is totalitarian in the sense that the government tries to control every aspect of one's life, even one's thinking.
European-style democratic socialism is harder to define, but it features high taxation and thick bureaucracy, more or less tight controls over the distribution of income, social services of varying quality, a lot of talking, a good deal of social freedom, but limits on individual economic freedom and economic growth, and lots of mediocrity and boredom. It's not too bad, but is also means that intelligent people have to take orders from idiots, but to a certain extent you can turn them off.
It appears that the US already is corporatist and is heading toward a complex hybrid of fascism and democratic socialism, mixed in with globalism ... already too many -isms for one off-topic post.
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