A subject any serious political scientist is familiar with.
"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. "—B. Mussolini via BrainyQuote
Here's a mish-mash of some of our blather on what real fascism is all about:
From the Political Capital website:
Political capitalism is a private-property, market-oriented system that is compromised by business-sponsored government intervention. It is a socioeconomic system in which many or most regulations, subsidies, and tax-code provisions result from the lobbying efforts of directly affected businesses and their allies.
Today in the United States, there is greater political transparency and competition between political elites than was evident in the business-dominated past (the 19th and most of the 20th centuries). Interventions routinely result from non-business special interests representing education, the environment, labor, minorities, religion, retirees, science, and taxpayers, among others. Still, business interests—unified or in opposition—are arguably the most important of the elites that compete for special government favor in American politics today.
There are two avenues to business success under a private-property, profit-and-loss system. When using the economic means, or free-market means, businessmen provide goods or services in an open market and rely on voluntary consumer patronage. When using the political means, businessmen obtain a governmental restriction or favor that provides the margin of success beyond what consumer preference alone would give. Market entrepreneurship is the way of capitalism; political entrepreneurship, or rent-seeking as it is known in the economics literature, is the way of political capitalism.
Business interests welcome competition for the things they buy (to minimize costs) far more than for things they sell. They may profess support for free enterprise in general but not in their particular area. There, competition is disparaged as "unbridled," "cut-throat," "excessive," or "unfair," and calls are made to constrain the free market.
Historian Gabriel Kolko has defined political capitalism as "the utilization of political outlets to attain conditions of stability, predictability, and security—to attain rationalization—in the economy." Much of the intervention that he and other historians documented in U.S. history was for business, by business to "allow corporations to function in a predictable and secure environment permitting reasonable profits over the long run."...MORE
From our March 2013 post "Copyright Infringement Now Seen As Terrorism":
As Political Capitalism becomes indistinguishable from Mussolini's Corporatism it's getting close to the time where the West has to decide just what it wants to be when it grows up.
"The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes, many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by acts of Congress."
Andrew Jackson (1830) Cited by Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 62
"Capitalism's biggest political enemies are not the firebrand trade unionists spewing vitriol against the system but the executives in pin-striped suits extolling the virtues of competitive markets with every breath while attempting to extinguish them with every action."
Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists. New York: Crown Business, 2003, p. 276.
Phrases such as "...the distinction between Fascism and vertical syndicalist corporatism based on guilds" make me the hit of any party.And yes, I know the distinction between Fascism and vertical syndicalist corporatism based on guilds. I'm just using a shorthand, readily understandable usage....
We've been circling this kind of stuff for years. In 2008's "Hank Paulson, George Washington and Benito Mussolini Walk Into a Bar: Part I" we looked at Machiavelli's Discourses on the First 10 Books of Titus Livy
2009 saw "Newsweek: Goldman Supplied 9 Pages of Proposed Changes to Derivatives Legislation (GS)".
2010 had "The Left Right Paradigm is Over: Its You vs. [Big] Corporations"
2011:
"President Obama Examines John Boehner’s New Tanning Bed at General Electric Factory" (GE)
Here's a gentle poke at the Speaker."Blaming Capitalism for Corporatism"
Because at Climateer Investing we're nothing if not equal opportunity,
We'll be back with more on the new chairman of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
His record at GE, the destruction of shareholder wealth, the shipping jobs to China programs, the bailouts and guarantees, crony capitalism, Mussolini style corporatism and power elites, the 3.6% tax rate, subsidies and Davos, all in good fun, of course.
...One of the authors has some of those Nobel tchotchkes.2013's "Blueprint For America: 'Fascist Italy's Experiment With Economic Corporatism'" had links to the above and to:
There's Pollution and There's: Führer Flatus
Scent of a Führer
Hitler wanted to control the world. But he couldn't even control his flatulence.
Guests at the Berghof, Hitler’s private chalet in the Bavarian Alps, must have endured some unpleasant odors in the otherwise healthful mountain air.
Mussolini and Hitler
The dictator who smelt it, dealt it
