Rising fascism in the US

@vikorr,

Hi vikorr.
I'll be happy to explain my reasoning.

vikorr wrote:

Quote:
unaffordable healthcare,
separate and unequal education,
federal money going to other countries without a vote,
abortion rights decided without a vote

These aren't facism. Not even the last two, because the virtually all governemtn decisions & laws are decided without direct vote by the public. Generally speaking, only constitutions get decided by direct vote by the public.

Lash wrote:
The aspect of America, the whittled down, brittle twig in our construction that is supposed to keep our country impervious to accusations of becoming fascist and authoritarian is that we are considered to be a representative government. We wave the flag of democracy, like the US is the shining beacon of democracy. Most Americans become indignant when someone points out our slide into fascism.

We are promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but increasing percentages of Americans die needlessly because they can't afford proper medical care. What other country charges hundreds and thousands of dollars for medical procedures? I don't accept this premise. I didn't agree to this. More than 70% of Americans want universal healthcare. If that is so, what group is preventing the overwhelming majority of Americans having it? What gives this small group the power to prevent the dire need and desire of the overwhelming majority? I believe this meets your standard of: centralisation of power in the hands of a few

In the same way, poorer people's children receive substandard education due to the communities their live in. This has always been so, and it's becoming measurably worse. Ten of the 12 teachers in my grade level left our Title 1 school this year due to an increase in fights, threats to teachers by students, and the school's refusal to pay for additional security, co-teachers to help in classrooms, and overcrowding when we had to pack in even more students because subs refused to come to our school.

In wealthier neighborhoods, parents opt for additonal taxes to pay for these things at their childrens' schools or they opt out of public school altogether--and safely enroll their children in schools away from the 'riff-raff'--ensuring that these kids who need an education so desperately to free themselves from the trap they were born into--will not get it. They come from trauma at home and experience it at school as well.

Compounding this horrifying collapse of the American education is lawmakers who have recently thrown in the towel on public education and now take money that should go to improve public schools and give it to private schools. They are actively killing off what's left of public education.
Who set this in motion? I didn't agree to this. Voting won't affect this. Even if we could find honest politicians to champion education, the fix is in nationally. There's no fighting for the needs of regular people in this country anymore. centralisation of power in the hands of a few

My president decided he's going to send 1 BILLION dollars to Ukraine. I can't imagine the billions the US has sent to other countries in the past five years. But, we're told that we can't afford universal healthcare for our own citizens. We have to become victims of our own government's predatory lending schemes if we want our children to have a fighting chance to earn a college degree. In recent generations, that student loan has grossly impacted the lives of young Americans. I wasn't asked if Biden could send that money. I didn't get a word in that decision--or any other decision.

centralisation of power in the hands of a few

Others in your list are likely debatable
- no idea what Corporations=Free Speach means
- don't know anything about some of the others in your list, not being from around your countries

Lash wrote:
Corporations = Free Speech was my short-hand for this:
The court held 5-4 that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations.
Majority: Kennedy, joined by Roberts, Scalia, ...
Citations: 558 U.S. 310 (more)130 S. Ct. 876; ...
Citizens United v. FEC

In my opinion, everything here is for sale. Judges, votes, the law, members of Congress. What is my vote against corporations who can now openly pay for the Congressperson who'll do their bidding?

I would have said the rise in fascism is caused by:
- government believing they are an entity built to serve the government, or 'the country' rather than 'the people'. 'The Country' is problematic because they may come to see the government as the country.
- increasing surveillance laws to serve 'the government' (or 'the government' through 'the country')
- increasing censorship that stretches to include the government (they usually do this internally first, so the people have no idea how corrupt the government actually is)
- increasing use of PR/Progaganda
- centralisation of power in the hands of a few
- making the populace lose trust in the judiciary
- actions designed to leave specific political figures as the only trustworthy source of information & leadership for the country
- personal appoint of friends / politically aligned judges
etc

all of these move a country closer towards the point where it can become a dictatorship or fascist state

Lash wrote:

I completely agree with your list, above.

I just see it in more places, I guess, than most people.

1 Reply

....I left out abortion rights.

Abortion is a healthcare issue, and it is outrageous in 2022 that a bunch of old men or religionists think they have any business making decisions for other peoples' healthcare.

You may rightly point out that is hasn't been a direct vote previously, but why not?

I don't accept the premise that just because a thing hasn't been done before that it shouldn't be done.

Again, Americans have no voice in things we should be choosing. Who is this little group of overlords and where did they get this power?

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I would have said the rise in fascism is caused by:

- government believing they are an entity built to serve the government, or 'the country' rather than 'the people'. 'The Country' is problematic because they may come to see the government as the country.
I think the power of political party can fit here, too.
The good of the party outweighs the individual's right to have their vote count equally to others'. Our country can have a groundswell of support for a candidate, but if the party bosses don't want that candidate to win their primary, they can (and have) tipped the scales.
- increasing surveillance laws to serve 'the government' (or 'the government' through 'the country')
I don't think anyone will argue that our government is in business with Google, Facebook, and other entities who spy on American citizens.
- increasing censorship that stretches to include the government (they usually do this internally first, so the people have no idea how corrupt the government actually is)
I've never witnessed the level of censorship intrusion that has recently happened in the US on the coattails of Covid. Biden recently scrapped an actual federal department mirrorinig Orwell's Ministry of Truth.
- increasing use of PR/Progaganda
The three mainstream media outlets practically speak with one voice. Oligarchs own our media and we hear what they want us to hear.
- centralisation of power in the hands of a few
Billionaires own almost everything and pay our millionaire lawmakers and judges to create a world that serves them.
- making the populace lose trust in the judiciary
A glance at Citizens United, the overturning of Glass Steagall, the criminal plantation judicial / incarceration system to know what's up with our judiciary.
- actions designed to leave specific political figures as the only trustworthy source of information & leadership for the country
I guess our Hitler is waiting in the wings, getting a haircut...
- personal appoint of friends / politically aligned judges
Laughable how long ago this became the norm.

I would so love to be wrong. Stick a fork in us. This show is over.

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@Lash,

Hi Lash,

I'm not saying that democracy isn't moving in a dangerous direction - I believe it is.

However, when a person uses the word 'fascism' - they should use it with care. It shouldn't become a byword for 'something I don't like' because the word loses all meaning when used in that context.

Whether health care has been universal or limited has always been a part of democracy that differs from country to country. Same goes for the equality of education. The choice of how to run these systems (which has existed for many decades) is a part of democracy rather than facism.

I can see why you don't like the direction both are heading in, and I agree that it is not in the best interests of any country to head backwards. The cause though, is more economic than political.

As the gender equality increases in the workforce, professional women started marrying professional men (decades back this wasn't anywhere near the % case it is today)...this trend created more free cash in the professional world...that increased free cash drove investment...which droves up house prices...that drove up rent...that put more pressure on the poor...and on and on....

Same for education - what you describe has been moving that way for decades because of economics, rather than politics. The more free money there is at the professional end, the more parents put their children through private school...the higher the concentration of bad eggs in the public system (and corresponding lower % of highly motivated students)....the more well off parents want to pull their children out of the public system...

I'm not overly familiar with the US health system, so can't really comment on it.

But my point is - at least for the education system, there is a much more plausible economic reason, than political reason for the worsening condition of the pre-existing systems. And a health system that has existed for what, a century(?) seems a far stretch to now call facist.

But those points aside, yes, US, and Western democracy in general is very arguably growing more facist (though I would simply phrase it as growing in a way that is hazardous/dangerous to democracy)

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I understand the difference between our opinions, but I continue to hold that the general list you presented as evidence of encroaching fascism are broader categories into which my specific evidence fits.

The average American citizen has lost any meaningful voice in what is being done to us and, supposedly, for us by an elite, unaccountable, untouchable group.

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@Lash,

Fair enough. As I've said many times, people should be able to disagree, so long as they can articulate (well) why the believe what they believe.

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It's funny how extreme left-wing politicians are proud of labeling themselves socialists or comunists, but extreme right-wingers shy away from identifying themselves a fascists or even reactionaries. Somehow, neo-conservative doesn't quite fit. Neo-conservatives are anything but conservative.

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Thomas calls for overturning precedents on contraceptives, LGBTQ rights
BY HARPER NEIDIG 06/24/22

FILE - Justice Clarence Thomas sits during a group photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, on Friday, April 23, 2021. Supreme Court justices have long prized confidentiality. It's one of the reasons the leak of a draft opinion in a major abortion case last week was so shocking. But it's not just the justices' work on opinions that they understandably like to keep under wraps. The justices are also ultimately the gatekeepers to information about their travel, speaking engagements and health issues.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday called for overturning the constitutional rights the court had affirmed for access to contraceptives and LGBTQ rights in an opinion concurring with the majority to decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

In his separate opinion, Thomas acknowledged that Friday’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization does not directly affect any rights besides abortion. But he argued that the constitution’s Due Process Clause does not secure a right to an abortion or any other substantive rights, and he urged the court to apply that reasoning to other landmark cases.

Thomas wrote, “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”

Since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion overturning Roe was leaked earlier this year, Democrats and liberal activists have warned that the conservative majority would soon turn its attention to other rights that the court has affirmed.

More from The Hill: What happens now that the Supreme Court overturned Roe?
The three cases Thomas mentioned are all landmark decisions establishing certain constitutional rights.

In Griswold v. Connecticut, the court ruled in 1965 that married couples have a right to access contraceptive. In 2003, the court said in Lawrence v. Texas that states could not outlaw consensual gay sex. And the court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges established a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

While Thomas’s comments outline the worst-case scenario for the majority’s liberal critics, it’s unclear whether the other conservative justices are willing to go as far as the court’s most senior member.

Alito stressed in the majority opinion that his reasoning applies only to abortion and rejected any assertions that the rationale in Dobbs could extend to Griswold, Lawrence or Obergefell.

“Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” Alito wrote.

The three members of the court’s liberal wing — Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — rejected that assurance in their dissent, saying the majority’s willingness to overturn the landmark decades-old decision leaves other precedents vulnerable.

“And no one should be confident that this majority is done with its work,” the three liberals wrote. “The right Roe and Casey recognized does not stand alone. To the contrary, the Court has linked it for decades to other settled freedoms involving bodily integrity, familial relationships, and procreation. Most obviously, the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. In turn, those rights led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting autonomous decisionmaking over the most personal of life decisions.”

“The majority could write just as long an opinion showing, for example, that until the mid-20th century, ‘there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain [contraceptives],'” the justices added. “So one of two things must be true. Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.”

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/3535841-thomas-calls-for-overturning-precedents-on-contraceptives-lgbtq-rights/

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The Thom Hartmann Program

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Should the Congress start impeachment proceedings on some Supreme Court justices for lying under oath?

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"We had an election that was stolen from us," Trump said from the White House. "It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side."
--Donald Trump

"The party would announce that 2 and 2 equals five and you would have to believe it. And it was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later. The logic of their position demanded it. But what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right, for after all, how do we know that 2 and 2 make 4 or that the force of gravity works or that the past is unchangeable. If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind and if the mind itself is controllable, well what then?"
--George Orwell "1984"

"Demanding that Republicans in the state of Texas accept the position that they should reject the 2020 election with no evidence, that's Orwellian. That is calling into question something as fundamental as the math and saying, 'don't believe math, believe the party, put your faith in the party.'"
--Beau of the fifth column

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https://img.ifunny.co/images/fc7cb85148f979ccc5a8c6010d3a9dac8b38f578461e7c56019c92cfccd049ee_1.jpg

It should be, go **** yourself, motherfuckers. Because that's what they are. They're ******* over their own mothers. Their mothers about now wishing they had had an abortion. Trump's mother for sure. She must have felt shame about what she reared.

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Jason Stanley: US is headed to a one-party State unless Americans wake up.

"Democracy is always fragile. Democracy is hard. This idea that we will perpetually be a democracy is a fiction. We're actually a new democracy. We only became a democracy once black Americans were given the right to vote in the 1960s. ...right now we're only a partial democracy. Democracies are a fragile thing by their very nature. A small sliver of humans throughout history have lived under democracies."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nc1d0WPmZU

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Thom Hartmann
@Thom_Hartman

1/ The Nightmare Scenario SCOTUS is Plotting For the 2024 Election Takeover:

2/ Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced — a story that has largely flown under the nation’s political radar — that they’ll consider pre-rigging the presidential election of 2024.

3/ Here’s how one aspect of it could work out, if they go along with the GOP’s arguments that will be before the Court this October:

4/ It’s November, 2024, and the presidential race between Biden and DeSantis has been tabulated by the states and called by the networks. Biden won 84,355,740 votes to DeSantis’ 77,366,412, clearly carrying the popular vote.

5/ But the popular vote isn’t enough: George W. Bush lost to Al Gore by a half-million votes and Donald Trump lost to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes but both ended up in the White House. What matters is the Electoral College vote, and that looks good for Biden, too.

6/ As CNN is reporting, the outcome is a virtual clone of the 2020 election: Biden carries the same states he did that year and DeSantis gets all the Trump states.

7/ It’s 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, a 74-vote Electoral College lead for Biden, at least as calculated by CNN and the rest of the media. Biden is

8/ Until the announcement comes out of Georgia. Although Biden won the popular vote in Georgia, their legislature decided it can overrule the popular vote and just awarded the state’s 16 electoral votes to DeSantis instead of Biden.

9/ An hour later we hear from five other states with Republican-controlled legislatures where Biden won the majority of the vote, just like he had in 2020: North Carolina (15 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10), Michigan (16), Pennsylvania (20) and Arizona (11).

10/ Each has followed Georgia’s lead and their legislatures have awarded their Electoral College votes — even though Biden won the popular vote in each state — to DeSantis.

11/ Thus, a total of 88 Electoral College votes from those six states move from Biden to DeSantis, who’s declared the winner and will be sworn in on January 20, 2025.

12/ Wolf Blitzer announces that DeSantis has won the election, and millions of people pour into the streets to protest. They’re met with a hail of bullets as Republican-affiliated militias have been rehearsing for this exact moment.

13/ Just as happened when Pinochet’s militias shot into crowds as he took over Chile, when Mussolini’s volunteer militia the Blackshirts killed civilians as he took over Italy, and Hitler’s Brownshirts did in Germany, their allies among the police and Army refuse to intervene.

14/ After a few thousand people lay dead in the streets of two dozen cities, the police begin to round up the surviving “instigators,” who are charged with seditious conspiracy for resisting the Republican legislatures of their states.

15/ After he’s sworn in on January 20th, President DeSantis points to the ongoing demonstrations, declares a permanent state of emergency, and suspends future elections, just as Trump had repeatedly told the world he planned for 2020.

16/ Sound far fetched?

17/ Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced that one of the first cases they’ll decide next year could include whether that very scenario is constitutional or not. And it almost certainly is.

18/ Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution lays out the process clearly, and it doesn’t even once mention the popular vote or the will of the people:

19/ “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress...

20/ “The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons … which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate.

21/ “The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President…”

22/ It’s not particularly ambiguous, even as clarified by the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887.

23/ Neither mentions the will of the people, although the Electoral Count Act requires each state’s governor to certify the vote before passing it along to Washington, DC. And half of those states have Democratic governors.

https://twitter.com/thom_hartmann/status/1543079225254559744?s=21&t=RhSUp2_DzYI-ArDeZgfqaQ

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Trump was hoping for a violent confrontation of groups opposing the January 6th mob so he could impose martial law and suspend freedoms. This exact thing was done in the third Reich. This was how they seized power.

The Thom Hartmann Program

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia0HEfa-Yu0

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Glenn Kirchner discusses the importance of opening impeachment inquiries of Supreme Court members.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1QmL1KUOjY

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@coluber2001,

This guy is an idiot. His first sentence is a blatant lie and he just doesn't like that the SCOTUS made a ruling he disagreed with. Therefore they must be cancelled.

What a stupid thing to say, especially publicly.

1 Reply

Rising fascism in the US

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