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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 7/10/09

The Continued Fleecing Of America And Its Citizens By The Financial Elites

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Emily Spence
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"...Fascism protected the land-owning elites and is regarded as a reaction against the rising power of the working class...

"Adolf Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that 'the attitude of the State towards capital would be comparatively simple and clear. Its only object would be to make sure that capital remained subservient to the State'. Hitler made a clear distinction between 'capital which is purely the product of creative labour and ... capital which is exclusively the result of financial speculation.'...

"Marxists argue that fascism is a form of state capitalism that emerges when laissez-faire capitalism is in crisis and in need of rescue by government intervention. Fascists have operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim has been to promote 'superior' individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class.Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism.Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because 'the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social.'

"Classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises argued that fascism was collectivist and anti-capitalistic. According to Mises, fascism maintained an illusion of respecting private property, since individuals could not use their property how they wished because the government frequently enacted regulations (on behalf of government allies in the business sector) that were not in line with the functioning of a free market.

"Historian Robert Paxton contends that fascists' anti-capitalism was highly selective; the socialism that the fascists wanted was National Socialism, which denied only foreign or enemy property rights (including that of internal enemies). They did, however, cherish national producers."

One might add that they particularly cherish fiscal producers, wizards that magically pull a seemingly endless stream of money out of the air for their favorite recipients. As H. L. Birum, Sr., suggests, "The Federal Reserve Bank is nothing but a banking fraud and an unlawful crime against civilization. Why? Because they 'create' the money made out of nothing, and our Uncle Sap Government issues their 'Federal Reserve Notes' and stamps our Government approval with NO obligation whatever from these Federal Reserve Banks, Individual Banks or National Banks, etc."

Moreover, one can easily supplement his views with those of John Adams: "Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good." (Can you imagine the comments that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and other founders of the nation would make were they to observe a number of contemporary Congressional activities in relation to banks and other organizations?)

At the same time, it's not all that hard to conclude that, for some time, U.S. government policy has been one typically called "last man standing." In other words, it is to throw the majority of federal funds into an effort to commandeer the last amounts of nonrenewable (and, in some cases, renewable, although depleting) critical material goods (through global resource battles, programs like NAFTA and so forth) with a sort of survival of the fittest (a modernized Social Darwinian derivative) model in mind.

As Henry Kissinger quipped, "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy" and "control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people." In other words, let's use the troops to enforce hegemony everywhere!


With such a Machiavellian frame of reference for expert guidance, the majority of US federal funds, of course, will continue to be slated for such endeavors as broadening wars, interest payments on further borrowed money and ongoing bailouts. In a similar vein, the fittest do not include the looted American middle and poor classes. They are immaterial and, as such, are mostly ignored or, if in terribly dire straits, pushed out of homes to live in city streets (90,000 in L.A. alone), tent cities (updated Hoovervilles) and car parks if they are fortunate enough to still have a vehicle in which to live after their domiciles are foreclosed and their jobs are removed. (Meanwhile, such loss is simply another program to enhance the monetary advancement by the elites -- the ones fittest to survive in the ever worsening environmental and financial downturns brought on by draconian economic growth policies.)

In the end, one has to ask whether practices that are aimed at government and business leaders mutually servicing each other represent the best interests of Americans and other peoples of the world. Assuming that this is not the case, great accountability must be demanded of these so-called leaders.

If they cannot be made to conform to reasonable moral codes of conduct, the USA will surely become a terrible place to be a citizen for the majority of people who find that, while conditions in their personal lives deteriorate, the wealthy elites make out just fine due to self-enriching agendas, like deficient public heath-care programs, that put everyone else in jeopardy. Put another way, "we can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." - Justice Louis D. Brandeis

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Emily Spence is a progressive living in MA. She has spent many years involved with assorted types of human rights, environmental and social service efforts.
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