Crimes Against Nature Read Free Page A

life, and community investment.
    Teddy Roosevelt often observed that American democracy is too sturdy to be destroyed by a foreign enemy. But, he warned, it could easily be destroyed by “malefactors of great wealth” who would subvert our political institutions from within. 2
    Roosevelt was no isolated Cassandra. Our greatest political icons from Thomas Jefferson onward have warned Americans against allowing corporate power to dominate our political landscape. In his most famous speech, President Dwight Eisenhower cautioned Americans about the grave danger of falling under control of “the military-industrial complex.” 3 In 1863, in the depths of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln is said to have lamented, “I have the Confederacy before me and the bankers behind me, and for my country I fear the bankers most.” Franklin Roosevelt echoed that sentiment when he warned that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” 4
    While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business. My
American Heritage Dictionary
defines fascism as “a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism.” Sound familiar?
    The rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers plenty of lessons on how corporate power can undermine democracy. While the United States confronted its devastating depression by reaffirming its democracy — enacting mininum wage and Social Security laws to foster a middle class, passing income taxes and antitrust legislation to limit the power of corporations and the wealthy, and commissioning parks and public lands and museums to create employment and safeguard the commons — Spain, Germany, and Italy reacted to their economic crises in a very different manner. Industrialists forged unholy alliances with right-wing radicals and their charismatic leaders to win elections in Italy and Germany, and then flooded the ministries, running them for their own profit, pouring government money into corporate coffers, and awarding lucrative contracts to prosecute wars and build infrastructure. Benito Mussolini’s inside view of the process led him to complain that “fascism should more appropriately be called ‘corporatism’ because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
    These elected governments used the provocation of terrorist attacks, continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and homeland security to privatize the commons, tame the press, muzzle criticism by opponents, and turn government over to corporate control. “It is always a simple matter to drag the people along,” noted Hitler’s sidekick, Hermann Goering, “whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
    The White House has clearly grasped the lesson. The Bush administration won’t ask its industry paymasters to protect their chemical and nuclear plants, but instead has devised an alert system seemingly designed to keep Americans in a constant state of apprehension. As to the war on terror, “It may never end,” warned Vice President Cheney in October 2001. “At least, not in our lifetime.”
    The historian Alex Carey observed that the twentieth century has been largely shaped by three trends: “The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.” The Bush administration marks the