On “the Poodles of Power”

by Adam Curtis

Les nouveaux chiens de garde

Plus de détails ici

On “fascism” in the U.S.

Paul Street on why the U.S. is not a “fascist” state:

Even if real historical fascism could be translated across times and place to the modern U.S. it would be largely redundant for America’s powers that be. The American elite already gets the basic regressive and authoritarian outcomes of fascism – increased exploitation and division of the working class, deepening concentration of wealth and power, the disabling of political democracy and social justice, the marginalization of dissent and critical thought, and the advance of stupendous and lucrative militarism and empire – without having to unleash the full brutality of fascist dictatorship.

[...]

Particularly “unnerving” to me is the possibility that this formation could be the most sophisticated and powerful species of authoritarian rule yet developed. As the brilliant Australian propaganda critic Alex Carey noted back in the Reagan-Thatcher era, the greatest and most potent long-term threat to “the liberal-democratic freedoms we are all supposed to enjoy” has not come from the 1984 “left” but rather in the deceptively “un-coercive” form of “a widespread social and political indoctrination, an indoctrination which promotes business interests as everyone’s interests and in the process fragments the community and closes off individual and critical thought.” – Link

And here’s a response with some seminal quotes:

Street’s beef is with semantics. In his opinion, it is not accurate to link the word ‘fascist’ with the word ‘America’.

Is he right? Some quotes:

“A few years ago, William E. Shirer, whose monumental The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich certainly qualifies him as a penetrating observer, commented that America may be the first country in which fascism comes to power through democratic elections… The main source of this new-style despotism is not the frenetics of the extreme right – the know-nothings, the private militias, the Ku Klux Klan, or the openly neo-fascist parties. Nor is it the crazies of the extreme left.

“True, either of these might play facilitating, tactical or triggering roles. But the new order is likely to emerge rather as an outgrowth of powerful tendencies within the establishment itself. It would come neither by accident nor as the product of any central conspiracy. It would emerge, rather, through the hidden logic of capitalist society’s transitional growth and the groping responses to mounting crisis in a dwindling capitalist world.”
- Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism, 1979

“We must dismantle the corporate state. American democracy has become a consumer fraud. If we do not halt the corporations that, in the name of globalization, are cannibalizing the country for profit, we will never blunt the appeal of the radical Christian Right to those the Corporate State casts aside. We must redirect our national wealth and resources to fund a massive antipoverty campaign. We must end corporate welfare, corporate crime, the hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate bailouts and seriously address the issues such as labor law reform. We must curb the cycle of perpetual war that enriches the military-industrial complex – and by extension the two political parties that dominate Washington. If we do not, we must accept an inevitable Christo-Fascism… This may be the twilight of American democracy. And it is better to stand up and fight, even in vain, than not to fight at all.”
– Chris Hedges, American Fascists

“The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power…

“Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion…

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism… They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
- Henry A. Wallace, 1944

“Fascism is capitalism in decay.”
- Nikolai Lenin

quotes from http://www.fascismusa.com/

Posted by margo @ Media Lens [reproduced here as messages on the Media Lens Message Board don't stay there for long.]

The network of global corporate control

“The structure of the control network of transnational corporations affects global market competition and financial stability. So far, only small national samples were studied and there was no appropriate methodology to assess control globally. We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.” – Link

via Media Lens

La Vesse du Loup : Les clés de mon pays

Quebec’s folk group La Vesse du Loup sings about yearning for independence. The lyrics are fairly powerful; the melody nostalgic with an undertone of anger, mainly targeting, I would say, the previous generation who they feel has let them down [« les beaux parleurs » as they are called].

Hitchens: a contrarian view

“Nobody should have to silently watch someone with this history * be converted into some sort of universally beloved literary saint.” – Glenn Greenwald

* Or as Murray writes: A strange and extremely unpleasant manifestation of intellectual prostitution.

Update: A somewhat more charitable view

A related link via Media Lens

Leftist debate on politics and power

A fascinating exchange of ideas on, amongst other things, the limits of the Occupy movement and the need to explore ways to bring about change of (not in) the system through the exercise of political power. Protests alone are an important start but, according to expert leftists and activists will just not be enough.

That is part of a conference entitled “The Left’s Responses to the Crisis in Europe and North America”. The full version can be found here.

Go figure …

Via Pulse

Some got it right though …

See also here and here [via Media Lens]

Free to be Human

An Interview with David Edwards

High finance mumbo jumbo

They are known as the “bots”, short for “robots” obviously. Others more derogatively refer to them as ”pickpockets” [slow loading].

A bit more on what they do: High-Frequency Trading: Alpha Discovery and the New Arms Race.*

Some want them out of the system while others think that they are here to stay and that it’s up to the system to adapt to the new reality.
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* ‘Alpha’ is a finance term referring to a stock’s performance relative to the market; it’s used more loosely by fund managers to describe beating their index – so every stock picker is essentially “seeking alpha.”