Thus in early 1944 the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Agard Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace’s answers to those questions were published in the Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:[11]
The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those...With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power....
American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information...
Noting that, “Fascism is a worldwide disease,” Wallace further suggested that fascism’s “greatest threat to the United States will come after the war” and will manifest “within the United States itself.”
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism, the vice president of the United States saw rising in America, he added:
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Finally, Wallace said,
The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people....Democracy to crush fascism internally must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.
Wallace’s president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, also called out corporate power when he accepted his party’s renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia:[12]
Out of this modern civilization economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties....It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction....And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.
And our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!
Fascism is rising in America, this time calling itself “compassionate conservatism,” and “the free market” in a “flat” world. The point of its spear is “corporate personhood” and “corporate free-speech rights.”
http://www.truth-out.org/unequal-protection-corporate-control-politics/1312226251
| 