fundamentals

If you didn't hear it you should take a look at the write-up of Dave Davies' interview of Bill Clinton's labor secretary Robert Reich on NPR's "Fresh Air" yesterday evening. Reich's new book, "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future," addresses the fundamental reason we haven't begun to recover from the economic meltdown of 2007-08: the growing concentration of wealth and income among the richest Americans. If the middle and working classes don't have money to spend, demand for goods and services -- the one and only engine of modern industrial economies -- collapses.

The super-rich do buy stuff with all that money, but their demand (there are so few of them) is insufficient to keep a giant macroeconomy up and running. Mostly they use their massive fortunes for further investment, i.e., speculation. I've known for a long time that when people have too much money, they go to the casino. That's all you really need to know.

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This is the golden age of political blogs, and when President Obama began lashing out at the "professional left" in recent days, angered and extremely annoyed with the intensity of press criticism his administration has been subjected to lately, the tantrum was a tacit admission that a small but very influential handful of left-wing bloggers have got into his underwear and next to his skin. Foremost among this cadre of critics: Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, John Aravoisis at Americablog.com, Atrios at Eschatonblog.com, Digby at Hullabaloo (Digbysblog.com), and the tag-team duo of Jane Hamsher and Marcy Wheeler at Firedoglake.com.

Why is this tiny group of internet scribblers so important? Because, as Peter Daou points out, although "Some will dismiss them as minor players in the wider national discourse...two things make them a thorn in the administration’s side: a) they have a disproportionately large influence on the political debate, with numerous readers and followers — among them major media figures, (and) b) they develop the frames and narratives that other progressive Obama critics adopt and disseminate."

Gone are the days when a person needed to own a printing press or a television network to bring down a smooth-talking con man in the White House. Nowadays, if you're forceful enough, write well enough, and have a few connections, you can touch off a revolt with nothing more than a laptop and an internet connection.

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The Tea Party movement and the Republican base are identical, and they are the face of American fascism. A lot of commentators try to avoid using the f-word, since it's misused so frequently (often by fascists) as a synonym for dictatorship or any kind of fiat authoritarianism, or as an epithet flung mindlessly at anybody we don't like. But I don't shrink from using it because, despite all the agonizing people frequently fall into trying to define it, fascism is actually a very simple thing, and a simpleton's response to the complexity and velocity of modern geopolitical life.

Based on fear and incomprehension, fascism rests like a three-legged stool on a trio of institutions: religious orthodoxy, militarism, and corporatism, which is the welding of government and big business into a single, seamless entity. A fearful, ignorant mind draws a sense of security from this all-encompassing security blanket of authoritarian, reactionary institutions which attempt to suppress, as opposed to dealing with, the political fallout unleashed by modern techniques of industrial production and finance. It's the classical form assumed by an upside-down revolutionary movement for the compleat idiot, and the current American version of it, with its highly refined use of electronic mass media as the principal instrument of social control, provides a textbook illustration of what classical fascism looks like.