politics

Fascism is great for any buisness that is already established. These people are already buying off the government, they're not the little guys who could be taken over by a fascist government, they're the ones pulling the strings.

The thing is, nobody ever said billionaires were smart. A lot of people conflate being wealthy with being intelligent, and that's simply not the case.

The fatal mistake the billionaire donor class is making here is that they think Trump can be controlled if he does win. They aren't worried about fascism because money is the real king of America and always has been.

And that line of thinking is solid until a fascist dictator who doesn't want to give up their power or have it limited by anybody else decides that the wealthy are no longer their allies and has the secret police "deal with them".

You shouldn't be. The rich supporting fascists (and vice versa) is nothing new.

:::spoiler Excerpts from Blackshirts and Reds, by Michael Parenti

To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.

In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the "March on Rome," contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy's top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist "revolution"—really a coup d'état—took place. . .

In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.

During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown-shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.

In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bourgeoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end. . .

Here were two peoples, the Italians and Germans, with different histories, cultures, and languages, and supposedly different temperaments, who ended up with the same repressive solutions because of the compelling similarities of economic power and class conflict that prevailed in their respective countries. In such diverse countries as Lithuania, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary, and Spain, a similar fascist pattern emerged to do its utmost to save big capital from the impositions of democracy. . .

Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their big business patrons by privatizing many perfectly solvent state-owned steel mills, power plants, banks, and steamship companies. Both regimes dipped heavily into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry. Agribusiness farming was expanded and heavily subsidized. Both states guaranteed a return on the capital invested by giant corporations while assuming most of the risks and losses on investments. As is often the case with reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by private capital.

At the same time, taxes were increased for the general populace but lowered or eliminated for the rich and big business. Inheritance taxes on the wealthy were greatly reduced or abolished altogether.

Many billionaires are not only morons, they’re racist morons. They also love the trappings of fascism—as long as they get to be the ones on top.

Have you seen that article about that one techbro rich boy and how he wants to structure San Francisco? How the techbros would wear grey shirts, and their Republican friends would red shirts, and everyone else would be forced to wear blue shirts, and those with grey and red shirts would get preferential treatment, because they would buy out the cops?

It’s a chilling article; I recommend reading it.

The DNC would rather

The newly elected delegates this year literally is the DNC. The smaller group of caretakers do not have the legal power to purge the large number of elected delegates. And these delegates are bound by the party charter to vote Biden on the first ballot. Unless Biden releases his delegates, which he could do and might do if convinced he is not the best choice to defeat Trump. So I am hoping that behind the scenes Dems are working furiously to convince Biden to release his delegates so that Gavin Newsome can be the nominee instead.

It’s easier to fundraise as an opposition party.

Any funds raised can only be used to win elections, not to buy themselves candy and ice cream. But if they don't win they don't get any personal gifts from lobbyists or cushy jobs after leaving office.

I admire your optimism, but even if you aren't willing to bend the rules and stick to the letter of the ethics rules, you can still use campaign funds for a fairly broad amount of items. And, if you are willing to bend the rules... when's the last time you heard of someone getting in trouble for misuse of campaign funds? If you remember one at all, i'd wager it was George Santos, and it took a huge amount of misuse there for people to start paying attention.