Fascism Now!

The Late Roman Empire was much like a Fascist state--without the populism. The Senatorial class was legally established as the class with power over government, but not the military. Not by coincidence, the Senators in the western empire monopolized wealth in the three forms in which it was recognized then: land, slaves and gold.

Because of their disproportionate wealth, Senators and their sons monopolized high civilian imperial offices: they bought them. Their wealth enabled them to exploit everyone else. Closeness to government and avoidance of taxation favored wealth accumulation among Senators. Since Senators as a class, also failed to reproduce themselves, estates tended to get bigger and fewer--inherited by the dwindling number of sons, nephews and cousins. They were the 0.01%.

Morally, culturally, or in the realm of "social issues," the Senators were extremely conservative or reactionary. Old ways were better, be it the old Roman religion over newfangled Christianity, social relations between landowner and coloni, performing meticulous rituals maintaining their class, or sucking up to the Emperor.

Fascism may be a mass movement--the Tea Party, for example--but paradoxically, it reveres class divisions with the 'best people' on top. The poor are either powerless, or the "masses" led by the best people. They don't talk of "classes," except as in leftists waging "class warfare," especially, when they try to assert their rights, or their own collective power.

Fascists in Italy and Germany incorporated large corporations in their economic system: they were major beneficiaries, even of the war-economy, with its need for armaments and its supply of slave labor.

In the US, we haven't gone quite that far, but the ground has been laid: unions weak or nonexistent, prisons privatized, a defense industry subsidized by government, the largest defense industry in the world; strengthening security services to the point of arrogance--getting away with strip-searching almost anyone by decision of the Supreme Court! The same court gave corporations the lever to regain control of government, after a 97-year hiatus, and perhaps corporations will--in the person of Mitt Romney, and a Republican leadership in both houses of Congress. Certainly, they are, transparently, the marionettes of the most aggressive anti-government billionaires the world has seen.

The question, the 6 billion dollar question, is: will money and media control buy the election? Or will people finally see, will Obama and Democrats finally articulate the rejection of this overweening security state, this demonizing of the jobless and women, this CLASS WAR being waged by the equivalents of the Roman Senators, waged on all the rest of us.

When the Senators won Roman governance, they reduced everyone else to serfs, and then were swept away by Germanic upstarts, the beginning of feudalism. Where we're headed, though, looks more like Fascism, its modern, mafia equivalent.

Unless Americans can wake up.