Fascism, as defined and warned about by one of America's most loved President, FDR ...
The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream
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On April 20, 1938, the Associated Church Press—a group of reporters for religious magazines and newspapers—met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, DC. One of their first questions was, “I would like to ask you, how great is the danger of fascism in this country?
We hear about fascism-baiting in the United States.” FDR’s answer was blunt, and it reveals a lot to us today of how Americans thought of “fascist” enterprises back in that day. “I think there is danger,” he replied to the question, “because every time you have the breaking down or failure of some process we have been accustomed to for a long time, the tendency is for that process, because of the breakdown, to get into the hands of a very small group.”
He then spoke directly to the issue of centralized—and distant—ownership or control of business by powerful interests, in this case the banks in New York.
FDR contracted adult polio at age 39 and was partially paralyzed from it, so he spent a lot of time in Warm Springs, Georgia, where people stricken by polio could float and lightly exercise in the warm, mineral-rich water. On several of his visits, he’d heard from the people who lived in Georgia that they weren’t happy with the way the “local” utility was refusing to extend electric power out to rural areas like the ones around Warm Springs.
“One of our southern states that I spend a lot of time in,” he said, giving an example to illustrate his point, “has a very large power company, the Georgia Power Company. There are a lot of people in Georgia that want to own and run Georgia power, but it is owned by Commonwealth and Southern in New York City. . . . Georgia has plenty of money with which to extend electric light lines to the rural communities, and the officers of Georgia Power Company themselves want it Georgia-owned or Georgia-run. But they have to go to New York for the money.
If it were not for that, we would not have any utility problem, and all of them would be owned in the districts which they serve, and they would get rid of this financial control.”1 But it wasn’t just that rural Georgia was being screwed by profit taking in New York and was powerless in the face of it. The controlling of electricity in Georgia by this for-profit privately owned monopoly meant that rural Americans in that state would still have to light their homes with kerosene and couldn’t even turn on a radio.
It also meant that workers were often stripped of appropriate compensation for their work. “You take the new lumber companies that want to start on this wonderful process of making print paper out of yellow pine,” FDR continued. “One reason for the low wages of the workers in the pulp mills of Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina is that practically all profits go north; they do not stay south. If the profits stayed south, the whole scale of living would go up.”
And then he brought it all back to the word fascism, which the dictionaries of the day defined as the merger of state and corporate power, a process that was well underway in Italy— where Mussolini had dissolved the elected parliament and replaced it with the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations, where the Italian equivalent of each congressional district was represented by its largest industry instead of an elected member—and Hitler and Tojo had both moved to bring powerful business leaders and industrial tycoons into government.
Hartmann, Thom. The Hidden History of Monopolies (pp. 33-34). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Here, fascism is defined by the very President of the United States that fought it and beat it. Don't let Republican trolls tell you any different. And here I have to recommend any of Thom Hartmann's books on various subjects ... Oligarchy, Monopoly, Health Care, Gun Rights, and others. Thom writes understandably, clearly, to the point, and vividly ... in the true interests of the American people.