Comment on Recipe for Fascism

Hedges brings together a great deal in this column to stew on. He rightly diagnoses pathologies and deceits on both the frightened far right and the frustrated and co-opted liberal left that jointly contribute ingredients to this "Recipe for Fascism".

Like an attorney, he begins to thread together his summation with comparative weaknesses of today's lost left, "The old left--the Wobblies, the Congress of Industrial Workers (CIO), the Socialist and Communist parties, the fiercely independent publications such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses--would have known what to do with the rage of our dispossessed. It used anger at injustice, corporate greed and state repression to mobilize Americans to terrify the power elite on the eve of World War I."

Hedges' closing argument would benefit from comparison with what has been also been lost since the FDR left of the 1930's. Imagine if Obama's "60 Minutes" interview, instead of being dull and gutless used FDR's class focused rhetoric to actually respond to the working (and Middle) class economic frustrations by calling out the "economic royalists", "malefactors of great (corporate) wealth", and financial capitalist "looters" (as economics Nobel Laureate, George Akerlof did), and thus reinforced the accurate public belief at the end of 2008 that not just "mistakes had been made", but that 'crimes had been committed' against the people and THEIR government?

That was the time at which, with a real 'learning moment', a more committed progressive than Obama could have had the entire non-elite public on board, and given vent to both tea-partist frustrations and fading liberal courage to fight for their common country and public interest--- and against a singular internal enemy, EMPIRE.

Hedges correctly critiques the leading ideologues on both the radical populist right, like Palin and Beck, and on the supposedly "elite utopian globalist" left, like the unnamed 'moneyed elite', or the real George Soros, who Beck rails against.

And Hedges accurately notes that, "The political theater funded by the corporate state is composed of hypocritical and impotent liberals, the traditional moneyed elite, and a disenfranchised and angry underclass that is being encouraged to lash out at the bankrupt liberal institutions and the government that once protected them."

However, even Hedges' rhetoric is too mild, and 'teaching moment' too limited, when he merely uses the term "corporate state" to define the common enemy of the dispossessed and deceived polity on the right and left.

The 'crimes that have been committed' have been carried out not by just a corporate state, but by a disguised corporate/financial/militarist EMPIRE only posing as a state--- posing as a government.

And the economic looting of our country and ourselves, which was the number one citizen issue of this just wasted election, was designed and premeditated by the corporate/financial EMPIRE and executed by the largest hidden tax on the American people; the hidden externality cost dumping taxes that the corporate EMPIRE extracts from the people through the government to cover-up the costs of the EMPIRE's own looting!.

Even Tea Partiers could be easily educated to the FACT that the corporate and financial looting by the banksters in their mortgage scam and the weapons makers in their imperialist war scams have imposed the costs on the government that directly causes all peoples' greatest tax costs today, and debts for their children. But neither Clinton, Bush, nor Obama ever even tried to make this closing argument to all the people, right and left, that they were elected to defend.

Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine