Imminent American Fascism

Folks, we're very much afraid that the hour is getting late.

That's why we're currently recommending that Progressive Living readers drop whatever else they're doing in order to pick up Jesse Ventura's new (2011) book "American Conspiracies."

In a nutshell, the Bush misadministration took advantage of the events of 9/11 to put into place a far-reaching fascist infrastructure that the Obama administration has done nothing to dismantle.

As if that weren't enough, we've also seen unprecedented antics on the part of rogue billionaires and multimillionaires, some of whom are bankers and financiers and insurers, some of whom are war profiteers, and some of whom are media magnates, but all of whom have been robbing the country blind and undermining American politics for decades. 

The truly alarming part, however, is that Bush's moves to implement fascism and the looting of the billionaires are intimately related.

Ventura points out initially that Americans have long been conditioned against acceptance of the existence of political conspiracies, though world history is a pageant of little else.

The Lincoln assassination, for example, is known to have been a conspiracy, but is always presented in American history books as the work of a lone assassin.  The airbrushing of history has been so heavy-handed here that there are individuals whose educational focus has been American history who are nevertheless unaware of this.

And prominent American businessmen attempted a coup d'etat that had as its target the FDR presidency — an event of enormous signficance, obviously, but which somehow has been swept out of the history books, too.

JFK, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King?  Watergate?  Conspiracies, all. There can no longer be any doubt.

But the cosmeticizing of history continues today with the cosmeticizing of contemporary journalism.  The far-from-mainstream corporate media, including such nominal beacons of journalism as the Washington Post and the New York Times, are fully complicit in spinning, omitting, and misrepresenting news.  Ventura points out, over and over and over again, junctures at which the democracy-hating corporate pseudo-media have failed flagrantly to do their job.

Nevertheless, dissatisifaction with Congress and with the media are, largely, misplaced.  Behind Congress and behind big media are the wealthy and corrupt.  As students of corruption know, enormous disparities of wealth and corruption invariably go hand in hand.  And the United States is now among the worst countries in the world for disparaties of income and wealth are concerned.

Still, the wealthy and corrupt aren't satisfied.  Though they are among the wealthiest individuals who have ever lived, they still aren't wealthy and powerful enough to suit them — hence the events that Ventura reports on.

Chapter Fourteen, "The Secret Plans to End American Democracy" lays out the specifics of the fascism-enabling agenda accelerated by Bush and Cheney.  When the many individual threads are brought together in one place like this, the big picture can be more readily grasped — and it is truly alarming.

But forewarned is forearmed.  Buy "American Conspiracies," read it, and stay tuned.  We'll be bringing you additional details in the days to come, details that will help you make sense of what's really going on.

But, whatever you do, don't give up on government.  If you're going to get mad, get mad at the right people:  the class-warfare waging, job offshoring hyperwealthy.

Otherwise you may just fall into the trap that Germans fell into when they went for a charismatic leader who seemed "strong."

The Editors
Progressive Living