RB, I'm afraid that if you look at the historical academic literature you'll find a marked inability to provide a definition of fascism that is generally acceptable. You will find such definitions by people who have a political interest in defining the term in ways that suit them. That's why I linked the Orwell quote about fascism now being used as a general term to refer to political ideas the speaker doesn't like. I'm not quibbling right now with your definition because I'm not at the moment looking at it, though I do recall that when I read it I found parts of it too narrow and parts of it too broad.

If the definition is limited to the actual tenets of the Italian Fascist Party, that's one thing, but if it gets generalized outside that context, the task of definition becomes troublesome. Even in the Italian context, people will disagree about which aspects of Fascist rule were the ones that were truly definitive and which were incidental. For instance, the anti-Semitism was a late arrival to Italian fascism, roughly contemporaneous with the alliance with Germany - so is racial thinking and bigotry part of the definition of fascism or not? Or is it an inevitable consequence of nationalism, which is a related but distinct concept?

The word gets tossed around pretty loosely. For instance, host and will think that the Fed's bailout of Bear Stearns was fascist, and came up with some twist on the concept of "corporatism" to justify it. I can think of lots of bad ways to describe the bailout but fascist is definitely not one of them. The bailout didn't involve commandeering large businesses to the service of the government and the military. It was unwise and unduly generous to JPM, and saddled the govt with stuff it shouldn't be saddled with (to my mind, they should have let Bear file chapter 11, but that's a discussion for another day) - but it wasn't fascist. It makes some people feel better to label things they don't like "fascist." But then they shouldn't be surprised when other people use the same trick to criticize things that they like.

for what it's worth, i've spent a lot of the past 15 years working on the history of the french left. anyone, anywhere who was not liked by group or party x was fascist. so yes, i know about that.

there are a core of ideas that enable people to use the word fascism to refer to a range of political ideologies...without that the idea would have no content at all--there are obvious variations--in your second paragraph, you introduced anti-semitism knowing that it was a feature of german fascism in ways that were particular to it--had you wanted to argue the point in another way, you might have isolated the tendency to eliminate all political opposition from the left--*that* is a constant--like the notion of national destiny, the united volk, the military Mission blah blah blah.

what seems to be the real problem for you is that fascism is actually quite difficult to render entirely Other than capitalist nationalism. this was a *real* political problem for the americans by the end of world war ii--how to enframe fascism as outside the purview of a nationalism that they themselves were fully invested in. it is a variant of nationalism in the straight capitalist mode. there is no way around that.

the fact that this is the case might lead you or anyone else to want a CLEAR idea of what fascism is in order to be able to react coherently when the line that separates ordinary capiralist nationalism from it started to blur. it does not come from Elsewhere, it is not an Import, it is not Alien--it is the intensification of tendencies that are central to the ideology of nation. period. this is the "political problem" that seems to bother you.

but instead of thinking about that, you seem to prefer to play this silly game of wanting to dissolve the category fascism, as if by doing that you can wish away the fact that nationalist ideology can be dangerous.

or worse, you'd prefer to make some separation between fascism and the capitalist ideology of nation. but you can't do that, and i suspect you know as much.

......

btw: i dont agree with how host uses the term "corporatism"---i think it's a mistake. the ideology of corporatism has to do with a notion of an organic division of labor, which gets grafted onto a rightwing reading of aristotle on the one hand, and onto a basically fascist notion of nation as organic community on the other. so it's not the same thing as oligarchy (you've pointed that out before as well) nor is it the same thing as domination by trans-nationals....
but if it is a tendency that is constantly available because it is a versioning of nationalism itself,

Um, no. Classically liberal capitalism, which is what I advocate, tends to separate the government from the economy. The original sin that leads to degradation of that kind of system is the opportunism many companies partake in when they go to the government for goodies. In my perfect world the govt would tell them to get lost, for a number of reasons, which are beyond the scope of this discussion. Fascism as I understand it entails, on the economic side, commandeering the economy to achieve nationalist ends - in effect, putting national greatness ahead of normal economic functioning of the free market.

That's the reason I see little difference between socialism and fascism - whether the govt owns the production or merely controls it, splitting the goodies with its cronies, makes very little difference. Both systems foster corruption and tyranny.

Socialism does not necessarily mean that the government owns anything or everything.

It means that all is under the control of the community directly influenced by or influencing it and there are many, many ways of implementing this.

Cooperatives are one means of directly introducing socialism from within a capitalist organisation. There are many styles of these which fall under the Rochdale Principles (so named after the first truly successful cooperatives in the mid 19th century England).

Workers cooperatives are probably those which spring immediately to mind, these are more in tune with the general understanding of socialist ideology as it is widely broadcast. Direct worker control.

Consumer cooperatives' members/owners are it's consumers. The largest of these in the world happens to be based in the UK. The Co-op (wiki)

It took almost half a millenium from the emergence of the Yeoman or their ilk for the first revolutionary class to take control of the planet.

Socialism hasn't had 200 years yet, give it a chance. :thumbsup:

so loquitor, i take it you like such stalwart fellers as alfred j nock?

http://www.barefootsworld.net/nockoets0.html

more of a Hayek/Friedman kind of guy.
I promise you, I'm sane.

just checking.

Fascism was often thought of -- mostly by fascist ideologues themselves -- as the Hegelian sublation of liberal capitalism AND socialism. Right wing thinkers believed capitalism didn't work, and in the Great Depression, who could argue otherwise? Socialism was wrong, but the crisis demanded action. You could say that fascists were post-socialist, but that 'post' is there for a reason.

You should also realise that there are different types of fascists and several axes to fascist thought. There's a populist/national axis, a militarist axis, a control axis. These cut through other ideologies obliquely. Some liberals ended up as fascists. Others fight it.

Another result is that fascism itself is cut into factions. On fascism's left wing you have someone like Kita Ikki, who seems to have been genuinely interested in poverty. Interestingly, his scheme for "rebuilding" Japan inspired many of Tanaka Kakuei's pork barrel projects, projects which became the financial motor of the postwar right. On the other extreme you have the pure militarists, like the S. American fascists so popular in Washington.

This is one reason why mapping the early 20th c. terms into a one-dimensional scheme such as the neo-liberal anxiety about the state and collective action -- i'm thinking of those Chicago boyz cited above -- you end up with absurd formulations like fascist = socialist.

I'm curious what will happen with this anxiety about collective action as the neo-liberal engineered economy swirls further down the toliet.

Never mind we live in the greatest prosperity EVER in the history of mankind, its swirls down the toliet as you say because we have an approaching recession, something we have NEVER seen before!

I think you need a dose of perspective.

Ustwo, you're funny...where do you get this "stuff"? It would be soooo much easier for me to post here if I could just say anything, without anything to back it up.....like you do!

All of the following information, from a wide variety of sources, including from economist Roubini, who has correctly predicted the unfolding economic conditions, meshes. Each article reinforces the other articles.... each opinion reinforces the other opinions....all except one.

We'll revisit this post one year from today....count on it!

I thought that was the Roaring Twenties.... :orly:

Host, Baraka..... I think the two of you have fallen prey to the recency/proximity fallacy, which is that the events closest to you in time and space get used to define baselines for comparison of ongoing events to "normal." Hitting an economic rough patch is a sign of a healthy, correcting economy that is purging toxins from its system. It's roughly the same as your kid running a fever that has to run its course so that the virus can be killed off: it looks pretty worrying while it's happening, but it does pass and then the kid goes on to grow.

If you step back and look at the main indicators of material well-being, which to my mind include things like life expectancy and nutrition, we are better off now than we ever have been. Not to beat a dead horse here, but we have the richest poor people in history - our poor people are obese rather than starving. The standard of living of a middle class person in the US at the turn of the 20th century was lower than the standard of a poor person at the turn of the 21st.

This does NOT mean we live in Utopia, nor does it mean we have no economic problems, nor does it mean things can't be improved. But this notion that there is impending economic doom is simply not supported. I suspect some of it is due to the obsessive focus on income inequality and the insistence that unless everyone has the same amount of stuff, that means the people who have a bit less than others are ipso facto deemed to be miserable - which is manifestly not true, unless you think envy is a good thing.

Nope.

okay....??? Are we over reacting....I have posted quite a bit of supporting material for my opinions?
...or, are loquitur and Ustwo exhibiting indications that they are in deep denial in reaction to what is already upon us?

How can "toxins be purged", when our "national socialist" leaders have constructed a "floor" for what they claimed was a "free market"? They didn't create a ceiling, and they worked mighty hard to help those who reaped the profits of the "up move", pay the smallest percentage of taxes on their gains since....well.....since 1932!

Looks like a once in 75 years "event" to me.... the economic downturn unprecedented in the living memory of over 90 percent of the US population.....BWDIK.... I only painstakingly support everything I post, and these two guys have earned advanced degrees and are in professional practice in their respective fields....

Right now it's a prediction, Host - your opinion. We'll know in a year if you're right, won't we? I just think it's an overreaction. Not every slowdown is a cataclysm. We haven't had a cataclysm since the 1930s, and to get that one we needed a perfect storm of worldwide economic foolhardiness. But look, you might be right and I might be wrong. We'll know in a few months.

Sooner or later we may well have another great depression.

So what?

Did we have children starving to death in the streets?

Did we have millions dead?

The socialists did, be it on purpose at times in an act of genocide or just a failure of the system.

At our very worst we were still better than the alternatives.

This is not prediction, loquitur:
It is upon us....it is the same bullshit as descibed by:
...and, it didn't work last time out, because it is about creditworthiness of borrowers, and market value of collateral, not about availability of funds to borrow.....
They were not "frozen assets"....the bids for these "assets", just as now, were based on their perceived value at that moment in time. Market participants perceived that they would be worth very little, immediately or soon after they were purcahsed. The Fed is accepting shit from these criminals on wall street, and loaning them money as if they were putting up "shinola" as collateral....at 2.25 annual interest.

Here is the way it worked last time...we are fortunate to be able to see the results, in advance, of taking in the brokerage firms' "shit" at the Fed discount window, but the Fed is doing it anyway....desparate? Cornered?
...and on July 8, 1932....the Dow 30 Industrial Average <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=%5EDJI&a=06&b=8&c=1932&d=06&e=9&f=1932&g=d">closed at 41</a>....down more than 350 pts. from it's Sept., 1929 high at 393 pts.

It's a broken system, loquitur....not a prediction....a broken system now, receiving welfare from the taxpayers....first time it's happened in 77 years.
You'll come to think it's never gonna bottom, never gonna end....just as your great grandfather did, last time it happened!

Host, the fact that the Fed opened the window to inv banks for the first time since the 30s does not mean this is a repeat of the 30s in other respects. You're resting a huge inverted pyramid of inference on a data point that won't support it. We don't have Smoot-Hawley, we don't have general tightening of credit at the Fed level (we have the reverse), we don't have an industrial, hard-asset based economy anymore. There are lots of other differences, too. Remember, we have an economy of something like $18 trillion (I might be off on the number); there's a lot of room for error before things turn into a disaster.

It seems almost like you want to see an economic implosion in this country. Why? Or am I just imagining it?

Well if Ustwo says it wasn't it must be true.:rolleyes:

If you figured that out in your constant trolling, you would be a better man.

sometimes it seems like discussions become contests the point of which is to see who can say the stupidest possible thing and no-one tells me that it happens.
so plod along i do expecting that there might somewhere be an interesting debate, and then i start hitting shit like this:


no-one tells me anything...

so, hooray, comrade: a champion you are.....

a tribute:




but maybe flush with triump though you may be, you might riddle me this:

how is it that relative economic prosperity enjoyed by particular class elements/sections/fractions--however measured (and the devils in the details of course--but that would require that you read a fucking book or three...)----is anything like a measurement of the ideological characteristics of the regime that enables that prosperity?

You know roachboy if you bitched about the system less and worked with the system more you could achieve some of that relative economic prosperity, though it might cut into that reading time for those fucking books.

Seriously dude, learn to function in the system before deciding it needs to be changed.

Really I have no idea why they made you a moderator, sorry you don't like my opinions but really you go to far in your objections, your saving grace has always been how few people bother to read your disjointed posts to know how insulting you can be.

At least in the case of loquitor's post earlier, he's not using economic prosperity of a particular class as an argument for the American system. Is he?
How do you measure the ideological characteristics of a regime?

You know, your approach here is basically a smug personal attack. Roachboy's economic status isn't something that you know about, it isn't something that is your business, and it has nothing to do with the topic here.

Also, it's a lame point since you you are implying that only wealthy people know enough to have an opinion.

I'm also not surprised that you have no idea why he's a moderator. Like the above, it isn't something you know about, it isn't your business, and it has nothing to do with the topic. If you've got a problem, take it up through PM.

The US is distinguished by how remarkably unaccomplished, in areas that it's government and society should be committed to improving, actually are:

Here's Denmark's stats:



The problem is that loquitur's argument vs. the facts, is unimpressive, as is what has been accomplished in the USA, even with all of the wealth, in key areas, the US performs below a third world neighbor lacking in medical facilities equipped with state of the art technology and medicines:

Host, I take it you didn't adjust things like, for instance, the greater number of preemie kids kept alive in the US, which brings down average life expectancy? or the higher number of miles driven, which does likewise? or any number of other culturally-driven factors?

Which criteria do you deem significant? Personally, I value personal freedoms quite a bit. OF course you wont' find much of that in Cuba...........

Can you explain the "preemie kids kept alive" point, how would it lower the US live birth stats compared to Cuba and to Denmark? Shouldn't Cuba, from your POV, experience a higher percentage of infant mortality, per your question?

It doesn't though....could nutrition and access to medical care be reasons?

Which country has the screening technology to most likely "weed out" predicted defective fetuses, long before they are at the delivery stage, Cuba, or the US?

They're "free" in Mexico, and our presidents form fast friendships with Mexican presidents....here are Mexico's stats:


Your last question, loquitur, amounts to an assertion of "better dead than red", and we have debated that in other threads....

Host, the US tends for cultural reasons to have higher obesity rates and mortality from car accidents (mainly becaues we drive more). That means our health statistics are not strictly comparable to countries with greater population density because they have fewer automotive-related deaths and countries with better eating habits than Americans. That's just two factors off the top of my head. Americans also tend to insist on more drastic measures to save marginally viable babies, so the infant mortality numbers are somewhat worse in the US than in other countries. These are cultural differences, not differences in quality of health care, and they have very little to do with the government. They are a consequence primarily of the individualist culture in this country.

Your stats are interesting but you're drawing inferences that may or may not be justified. You haven't established anything about why the numbers are different, only that they are different. Beyond that you're just making assumptions. For example, in a town of Jehovah's Witnesses where they refuse blood transfusions, there are going to be more deaths of a certain type than in other places - but it won't be due to inadequate medical care in the JW town, it'll be due to the cultural difference about transfusions. In other words, you're succumbing to the same fallacy I talked about earlier, which is that you're isolating a data point and constructing a huge inverted pyramid of inference on top of it that isn't warranted.

And my other point isn't better dead than red, that is a massive misstatement. It is that you should consider carefully your romance with left-wing dictatorships. A country whose self-glorifying dictators purchase the submission and quiescence of its citizens with "free" medical care is not a model we should want to follow. Socialized services were originated by Bismarck as a way to keep the populace quiet and narcotized in order to stave off demands for democracy. Cuba is no different.

You touted the points above to make your "it's a great country, a great system" case, I assume.....

I showed you a country with just ten percent capita US GDP that must have equalled "nutirtion" experienced in the US....it had a tad lower deaths per live births stats, didn't it?

I showed you an ODC, Denmark, with 19% lower GDP per capita than in the US, that achieves dramatically lower deaths per live births than the US does.

I showed you Mexico's live birth stats....it's a free country, but you have to survive birth to "enjoy" the "freedom".

You dispell none of that with your traffic and obesity morbidity argument. Your
"better dead than red" argument, in an earlier post, as an argument against Cuba's achievements in a core quality of life area, when Mexico is pulled up alongside, is.... what it is....meaningless, just as the argument you started out with:
Denmark and Cuba put the US to shame in those categories, and Mexico's government/economic system is greatly preferred by our political and business establishment, over Cuba's...... so what does that speak to, about your standards, or the standards of our establishment?

I've made two equity options trades in the past half hour and you come at me with that "crap"? If you want to paint me as one who is having a love affair with "marxism", you need to become better acquainted with me. Can you not fathom that I can be critical (openminded?) about US failings and yet not be advocating a socialist model? I pointed out Denmark and Mexico, too. Which country, if you had a choice, would you prefer to be conceived and delivered in, if your were a fetus with a choice, in Mexico, or in Cuba....in Denmark, or in the US? Remember....again, you brought up life expectancy and nutrition, to support your argument....

Couldn't it just as easily be that I exhibit an openminded political demeanor and you come off like a predictably indoctrinated American?

host, you really don't see the mote in your own eye, do you....... Please accord me the basic respect of having my own opinions, fairly arrived at.

This discussion started because you posited that our economy sucks, we are collapsing, the depression is nigh, etc etc etc. I called bullshit so you started this diversion comparing life cycle indicators in various countries. I'm kicking myself for letting you pick out details and change the subject to the one you prefer.

No, host, I'm not playing by your rules as you try to shift the terms of discussion every time the subject gets too tough for you. You don't get to move the goalposts. Come back to what we were talking about. If you think the economy is collapsing, why are you trading options? You should be buying gold and preparing to emigrate.

Put up or shut up, host - prove that the US economy is collapsing into a depression. And I mean depression: cratering of the Dow, 25% unemployment, stuff like that. I'll wait. I had said that there is no evidence of depression and that we are materially better off than we have ever been. Your response is that other people are better by certain indicators - which is irrelevant. There is no depression on the way and we in fact are better off than we have ever been by any objective measure.

And we still have the richest poor people in the history of the world. You wanna change the topic? You still haven't explained obese poor people as a historical phenomenon.

I sold some Lehman Apr 35 put options that I bought late yesterday @ $2.60

Sold them @ $4.00 shortly after the open this AM:



All of the brokerages are "short plays", now....here's why...unprecedented since the depression....more regulation translates to bringing their leverage down to the level of the regulated banks who also get to use the Fd discount window. Banks leverage limit is 7:1, Bear and Lehman are at 30:1 .

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ie...=1&sa=N&tab=wn

Brokerages can choose to stop dropping their crap collateral off at the Fed discount window in exchange for borrowed T-Bills loaned to them at the face value of the near worthless MBS they put on the FED (i.e., on the taxpayer)
....T-Bills sold into the market (short sales, since they are borrowed from the Fed...) or, if they won't accept de-leveraging, they can get along in the free market, and go BK like Bear would have without a JP Morgan fronted, Fed nationalization......

Matter of fact, Host, I just went back and looked at my first post in this subdiscussion, and it is a complete answer to what you just said:After I write something like that, and you come back extolling Cuba, I can hardly conclude anything other than that you like Cuba.

OMG I just read your last post, Host - you just said that regulation kills off wealth! That's an amazing insight!

No, loquitur, the leverage that the brokers use, kill off wealth, ala Bear !

If you are leveraged 30:1 and you experience losses of just 3.33%, you could be insolvent.... you no longer have any principle remaining in the porfolio. The next dollar lost is the dollar of the lender.... all of your portfolio is composed of debt.

If you put down 5% on a home purchase and borrow, 95%, and the home is appraised at $200k and you pay $200k, if the appraised value drops below $190K, you owe more than the house is worth, and your equity is gone, and that is an example where leverage is only 20:1.

If banks and brokerages were limited to 2:1 leverage, and all mortgage applicants were required to put a 50% downpament into their home purchase, do you suppose we would have lower, stable, home prices, and almost no foreclosures? Leverage is the cancer that makes the flood of money that bid up home prices, until they crashed, possible. Leverage does the same thing to equity markets.

This month, has our government socialized major losses, where it was previously in the process of minimizing the taxes on the profits of participants in the speuclative housing market bubble?

<h3>What do you call a political/economic system that does those two things, back to back?</h3>

Here is another explanation about leverage:

It's been a Ponzi scheme, loquitur...even the 7:1 leverage that the Fed permits the banks to max out at....is a Ponzi scheme.... It is the lack of regulation, the printing of fiat script out of thin air....fronted as "money: that permits the leveraging, that destroys wealth, the regulation is not the cause of wealth destruction.

The creation of the Fed was a deregulating mechanism, counter to the language about creation of money, specified in the constitution:

I'm sounding like Ron Paul, now, but he would refuse to socialize Bear, Lehman, and Merrill's losses, I hope.

I understand how leverage works, Host. I have a client whom it killed, whom I had to help out of a mess.

But leverage killing wealth is not what you posted:
The regulation is what's killing the wealth according to that sentence. Leverage, when used properly, can create wealth - but it's tied to risk, and sometimes risks go sour as it did with Bear. How much risk should you handle? More than regulators will let you, less than some people will want. Those who lend the money for the leverage are at risk, too - if they take the risk of lending too much, they get slammed as well. That's called a market.

The Fed keeps leverage down for entities it helps because it wants to cut its own risk. Can't blame the Fed, but that doesn't mean there is some ideal level of risk that the Fed knows and others don't. Like most bureaucrats, the Fed will choose low risk levels. That puts a ceiling on profitability, because reward follows rational risks.

Oh, and if someone is leveraged 30:1 on a large percentage of his wealth, then he's a fool and deserves to go under, right?

I'm with you that losses by people who took risks and lost shouldn't be socialized. That's what we have bankruptcy laws for.

On the scale we're talking, I don't think that level of laissez-faire can work. Smacks of schadenfreude, but with far reaching and unpredictable effects...

One can only say that the laissex-faire solution to the '29 crash didn't work out too well.

the govt's actions re the '29 crash weren't laissez faire. That's a myth.

so herbert hoover wasn't passive enough for you?

Really? How about comparing Canada and Australia then? They drive a lot in those places, too. These countries have brought down their road death rates down more than the US.

And if the Irish had had a better, more varied diet during the 19th C. fewer of them would have starved or had to emigrate. The potato famine had nothing to do with global trade, colonialism, distribution of wealth, or anything like that. It was all the fault of white trash culture. Right?

Babies are saved so infant mortality rates are worse? This makes no sense.

Or perhaps the individualist culture is a an adaptive response to the inadequacies of the American social infrastructure.


It being one of the features of a socialist society, it would be odd if Cuba didn't have socialised services.

so, come up with the numbers for Canada and Australia. I would expect that they are higher on some measures and lower on others.

On the infant mortality numbers, if you count marginally viable babies as live births, you use heroic measures to save them and a higher percentage of them die, you adversely affect the life expectancy numbers. If you don't use heroic measures and deem the extreme preemies lost causes so that they die, as in many other countries, they count as miscarriages rather than live births. That's what I was getting at. No big mystery.

guyy, I didn't understand what you were talking about with the Irish emigration and the potato famine.

And I agree that it's possible to dispute the direction of causality between culture and government, but in general, over the long term people get the government they really want. It's a revealed preference, to use the economic term.

My point about socialized services in Cuba was that those services aren't necessarily the sign of an enlightened society, given that they were originated by Bismarck as a way to keep the masses quiescent and to stave off demands for democracy.

loquitur, according to this impressively impartial study, in 2003, Cuba experienced 39.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 births, almost twice the rate of death of black American mothers, and four times the rate of white Americans.....

The thing I wonder, and I should think you would want to wonder about too, is whether or not your political attitude towards Cuba is part of a collective influence that has the literal effect of killing people.

If your political prejudices are in actuality, an avoidable outcome of your political ideology, is there a political attitude that could be more treacherous or ignorant, expecially since it's practitioners consider themselves, almost unquestionably, to embrace "reasonable" political POV?