What Does USA Stand For?

[GRG55]

Could it be that USA now means Unlimited Socialist Aid???

For everyone...:p

GM Bailout May Mean Government Becomes Biggest Holder

April 28 (Bloomberg) -- General Motors Corp., operating with $15.4 billion in U.S. aid, would be at least half owned by the U.S. government under the automaker’s plan to slash its debt and cut dealer ranks more than 40 percent.

The proposal, if accepted by the Obama administration, would give the Treasury at least half of the 60 billion shares in a reorganized GM, the automaker said yesterday. The U.S. would join European and Chinese governments in holding stakes in local automakers.

“Political economics are now part of the economy in the U.S.,” said Sean McAlinden, a labor analyst and economist at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“They are going to control more of GM than the government of Lower Saxony owns of Volkswagen or France owns in Renault.”...

[cjppjc]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

I know Facist is a word with bad overtones. But isn't this the definition of Facism?

[FRED]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

I know Facist is a word with bad overtones. But isn't this the definition of Facism?

American Corporatism: a kinder, gentler fascism, without the political prisoners. All debt prisoners welcomed.

[vanvaley1]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

Little Dorrit comes to mind. Didn't the Brits have a debtor prisoner ship system also? Know three of my ancestors had POW sheltering experiences with British prisoner ships back in the good ole days. Since they were located off Long Island I'm assuming they were five star accommodations.

[don]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

American Corporatism: a kinder, gentler fascism, without the political prisoners. All debt prisoners welcomed.

The U.S., if nothing else, has built off of European foundations. Think Colonialism- Neocolonialism.

Begging the question, who will riff off the U.S. foundation of neo-liberalism?

China?

[rogermexico]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

I know Facist is a word with bad overtones. But isn't this the definition of Facism?

Yes. This is like seeing aliens land in your back yard.

This country has become utterly unrecognizable.

Enough to convert one from a Republican to a flag-burning anarcho-capitalist.

I am embarrassed and ashamed to be an "American". I now want to move to the state that is most likely to secede.

[flintlock]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

Yes. This is like seeing aliens land in your back yard.

This country has become utterly unrecognizable.

Enough to convert one from a Republican to a flag-burning anarcho-capitalist.

I am embarrassed and ashamed to be an "American". I now want to move to the state that is most likely to secede.

Amen brother! Frankly, its sad when secession is your best hope, but I fear it really has come to that. Democrats now have a supermajority to ram through any and every socialist program they can think of. Not that the Republicans were doing a great job either.

[rogermexico]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

Amen brother! Frankly, its sad when secession is your best hope, but I fear it really has come to that. Democrats now have a supermajority to ram through any and every socialist program they can think of. Not that the Republicans were doing a great job either.

How do we form a third party without attracting "truthers" and the Aryan brotherhood? That is the difficulty. I don't have much hope for prying the republican party from the grips of the flag-humping world-policers and religious right.

Resurrect Goldwater?

[Ruy DelSambuco]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

How do we form a third party without attracting "truthers" and the Aryan brotherhood?

I think I have read that in the U.S., something like 20% of the populations controls something like 80% of the wealth. If this is true, and if the current political parties represent the 20%, it seems that a 3rd party organized along class lines might be competitive. I know that Americans do not enjoy talking about class, so I apologize in advance if I offend anyone.

[KGW]

That Bastion of American Socialism

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/0...socialism.html

January 2009

That Bastion of American Socialism

Dmitry Orlov


Over the past few months the American mainstream chatter has
experienced a sudden spike in the gratuitous use of the term
"Socialist." It was prompted by the attempts of the federal government
to resuscitate insolvent financial institutions. These attempts
included offers of guarantees to their clients, injections of large
sums of borrowed public money, and granting them access to almost-free
credit that was magically summoned ex nihilo by the Federal Reserve.
To some observers, these attempts looked like an emergency
nationalization of the finance sector was underway, prompting them to
cry "Socialism!" Their cries were not as strident as one would expect,
bereft of the usual disdain that normally accompanies the use of this
term. Rather, it was proffered with a wan smile, because the
commentators could find nothing better to say – nothing that would
actually make sense of the situation.

Not a single comment on this matter could be heard from any of the
numerous socialist parties, either opposition or government, from
around the globe, who correctly surmised that this had nothing to do
with their political discipline, because in the US "socialism" is
commonly used as a pejorative term, with willful ignorance and
breathtaking inaccuracy, to foolishly dismiss any number of
alternative notions of how society might be organized. What this new,
untraditional use of the term lacks in venom, it more than makes up
for in malapropism, for there is nothing remotely socialist to Henry
Paulson's "no banker left behind" bail-out strategy, or to Ben
Bernanke's "buy one – get one free" deal on the US Dollar (offered
only to well-connected friends) or to any of the other measures,
either attempted or considered, to slow the collapse of the US economy.

A nationalization of the private sector can indeed be called
socialist, but only when it is carried out by a socialist government.
In absence of this key ingredient, a perfect melding of government and
private business is, in fact, the gold standard of fascism. But nobody
is crying "Fascism!" over what has been happening in the US. Not only
would this seem ridiculously theatrical, but, the trouble is, we here
in the US have traditionally liked fascists. We had liked Mussolini
well enough, until he allied with Hitler, whom we only eventually grew
to dislike once he started hindering transatlantic trade. We liked
Spain's Franco well enough too. We liked Chile's Pinochet after having
a hand in bumping off his Socialist predecessor Allende (on September
11, 1973; on the same date some years later, I was very briefly seized
with the odd notion that the Chileans had finally exacted their
revenge). In general, a business-friendly fascist generalissimo or
president-for-life with no ties to Hitler is someone we could almost
always work with. So much for political honesty.

As a practical matter, failing at capitalism does not automatically
make you socialist, no more than failing at marriage automatically
make you gay. Even if desperation makes you randy for anything that is
warm-blooded and doesn't bite, the happily gay lifestyle is not
automatically there for the taking. There are the matters of grooming,
and manners, and interior decoration to consider, and these take work,
just like anything else. Speaking of work, building socialism
certainly takes a great deal of work, a lot of which tends to be
unpaid, voluntary labor, and so desperation certainly helps to inspire
the effort, but it cannot be the only ingredient. It also takes
intelligence, because, as Douglas Adams once astutely observed,
"people are a problem." In due course, they will learn to thwart any
system, no matter how well-designed it might be, be it capitalist,
socialist, anarchist, Ayn Randian, or one based on a strictly literal
interpretation of the Book of Revelation. However, here a distinction
can be drawn: systems that attempt to do good seem far more
corruptible than ones that have no such pretensions. Thus, a socialist
system, inspired by the noblest of impulses to help one's fellow man,
quickly develops social inequalities that it was designed to
eradicate, breeding cynicism, while a capitalist system, inspired by
the impulse to help oneself through greed and fear, starts out from
the position of perfect cynicism, and is therefore immune to such
effects, making it more robust, as long as it does not become
resource-constrained. It seems to be a superior system if your goal is
to keep the planet burning brightly, but when the fuel starts to run
low, it is quickly torn apart by the very impulses that motivated its
previous successes: greed turns to profiteering, draining the life
blood out of the economy, while fear causes capital to seek safe
havens, causing the wheels of commerce to grind to a halt. It could be
said that an intelligently designed, well-regulated capitalist system
could be made to avoid such pitfalls and persevere in the face of
resource constraints, but the US seems laughably far from achieving
this goal.

Taking intelligence itself as an example, if having more of it is a
good thing, then a bit of socialism could have helped a lot. Let us
start with the observation that intelligence, and the ability to
benefit from higher education, occur more or less randomly within a
human population. The genetic and environmental variation is such that
it is not even conceivable to breed people for high intellectual
abilities, although, as a look at any number of aristocratic lineages
will tell you, it is most certainly possible to breed blue-blooded
imbeciles. Thus, offering higher education to those whose parents can
afford it is a way to squander resources on a great lot of pampered
nincompoops while denying education to working class minds that might
actually soak it up and benefit from it. A case in point: why exactly
was it a good idea to send George W. Bush to Yale, and then to Harvard
Business School? A wanton misallocation of resources, wouldn't you
agree? At this point, I doubt that I would get an argument even from
his own parents. Perhaps in retrospect they would have been happier to
let someone more qualified decide whether young George should have
grown up to incompetently send men into battle or to competently
polish hub caps down on the corner.

Many countries, upon achieving a certain level of collective
intelligence, or upon finding themselves blessed with a sufficiently
intelligent benevolent dictator, followed a similar line of reasoning,
and organized a system of public education that meted out educational
opportunities based on the ability to learn, not the ability to pay.
In countries where such reforms were successful, society benefited
from the far more efficient allocation of resources, becoming more
egalitarian, better-educated, and more stable and prosperous. The
United States is one such country, where, following World War II, the
GI Bill did much to mitigate against the oppressive social
stratification of American society during the Great Depression, giving
it a new lease on life. In a politically honest country, this
achievement would have been touted as a great socialist victory. Here,
instead of building on this success, it was allowed to ebb away, until
now fewer and fewer qualified candidates can shoulder the high cost of
higher education, and even these have to forgo education proper in
favor of vocational training, in order to be in a position to pay back
student loans.

Other traditional socialist victories include securing the right to
housing, child care, health care, and retirement. In the context of US
public policy, many people will point to Roosevelt's New Society
"middle-class entitlements" as examples of such victories, Social
Security and Medicare being the big ones. As they point, they should
also laugh. What pitiable excuse for public housing are these
"projects" in which many of the poor are forced to live? Are
inner-city public schools "education," or are they, as many of the
teachers who work in them would agree, jails for young people? Is free
medical care such a great achievement if you have to survive to
retirement age, either as a wage slave, or without access to health
care, in order to qualify for it? To add insult to injury, there is a
limitless supply of pundits and experts, who can always get free air
time to claim that even these feeble attempts at an equitable society
are fiscally unsustainable and therefore must be curtailed. Poor
embargoed Cuba can afford to provide such luxuries, but the United
States is too poor to do the same? Pardon me while I attempt to knit
my brows into an incredulous frown while simultaneously twisting my
lips into a disdainful sneer! Might there perhaps be another reason?
Could it be that the lack of socialist education policies has allowed
our collective intelligence to drop to a level where the bulb glows
too dimly for us to see what is being done to us? No, these are not
victories, and they are certainly not socialist.

You might think that an argument could be made that this is all
irrelevant, because the flip side of a socialist defeat is a
capitalist victory. You might think that all of this talk of social
rights causes erosion of respect for money and property, followed by
other kinds of moral decay. You might also think that it is unfettered
free enterprise that has made mainstream American society the
economically stratified, downwardly mobile and economically insecure
place that it is, which is just as it should be. Alas, that argument
is no longer plausible: the flip side of a socialist defeat is a
capitalist defeat. No matter what your political persuasion might be,
there is simply no way that an economically insecure, badly educated,
badly treated population can be made to thrive, and this sets the
stage for some very bad economic performance. As the economy collapses
and economic losses mount, social and political instability become
inevitable.

Luckily, the converse of case is not inevitable: a capitalist defeat
does not automatically mean a socialist defeat. While an economy that
has lost its ability to grow signals the onset of terminal illness for
any capitalist system, socialist institutions can operate at a loss
virtually ad infinitim, delivering worse and worse results, but
distributing them equitably, so that no-one has more cause to complain
or to rebel than anyone else. In an age of dwindling resources – be
they mineral, ecological or financial – a socialist system stands a
better chance of holding together than a capitalist one.

To further elucidate this fine point, let us consider two different
environments: the cruise ship and the life boat. Aboard the cruise
ship we find Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, George Soros and Warren
Buffet, along with their assorted henchmen, fellow-travelers and
capitalist stool pigeons. While they are aboard the cruise ship, these
four worthies try to outdo each other in their outlandish spending
behavior, and all rejoice in their orgy of conspicuous consumption.
But now the cruise ship hits an iceberg and starts to go down, and the
four capitalist luminaries take to the lifeboat, along with the
passengers and the crew. While leaping aboard, Warren Buffet falls
overboard and sinks like a rock because of all the gold bullion sewn
into his belt, leaving three worthies to contend for the meager supply
of biscuits and fresh water. They hold an auction, and Gates wins all
of the biscuits. But before he manages to wolf down a single biscuit,
he is compelled, under murky and tumultuous circumstances, to swallow
a great quantity of seawater, bringing on hallucinations, renal
failure, and death. Larry Ellison then announces that he has just gone
on a diet, while George Soros looks around in confusion and says
"Don't worry everyone, I am buying." The captain of the sunken cruise
ship then asserts his authority, and, with everyone's vocal consent,
confiscates all money and all provisions, and institutes biscuit and
water rations. Luckily, it is the monsoon season, and the plentiful
rain allows everyone to drink their fill by catching water in their
hats, but the biscuits soon run out, and it becomes necessary to eat
someone. They draw lots, and Ellison gets the short straw. Before he
gets done explaining how many millions he is willing to spare in
exchange for them sparing his life, a member of the crew drives a boat
hook through his eye socket, and he is promptly eaten. By a strange
and suspicious coincidence, Soros is eaten next. But then, after a
month adrift, the castaways are finally rescued by a passing
freighter. No charges are brought against any of them, because the
acts of murder and cannibalism were deemed necessary to survival, and
were performed fairly, by the drawing of lots, in accordance with the
ancient custom of the sea. If their rescue were delayed, they could
have eaten each other down to one final ancient mariner, who would
then starve to death, all fair and square and above board.

But how, you might reasonably want to rejoin, might the sinking cruise
ship of the United States conceivably effect a transition from a
highly-capitalized, highly-leveraged system of for-profit private
enterprise to a more socialist-minded lifeboat model? What
institutions can aide with the transition? Would the whole thing need
to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up? Now, these are very
serious questions indeed.

Currently, a great many people are filled with hope that the incoming
Obama administration will bring much-needed change. Unfortunately, Mr.
Obama inherits an office much tainted by his predecessor, whose
attempt at securing his legacy included a clandestine trip to Baghdad
where, when he attempted to speak of victory, someone threw shoes at
him and called him a filthy dog, all on international television. The
US presidency is now a carnival side show: "Step right up, ladies and
gentlemen, and toss your shoes at Mr. President, for a chance to win
an all-expense-paid stay at our luxurious Abu Ghraib suite!" Alas,
Obama inherits an imperial mantle that has been trampled in the mud.
Due to a certain quirk of the national character, most Americans have
trouble understanding that honor is something you lose exactly once.
(As H. L. Mencken pointed out, in America honor is used only in
reference to members of Congress and the physical integrity of women.)
This quirk may not be significant in domestic politics, but the US
crucially depends on the rest of the world for every kind of support.
There are countries, in the Muslim part of the world especially, where
honor is of paramount importance, and having the highest office in the
land turned into a laughing-stock is not conducive to securing their
support.

And then there are the additional problems of poor advice and lack of
authority. To build support for his plans, Mr. Obama must rely on the
consensus advice of mainstream American economists. These astrologers
to the wealthy, with their fancy astrolabes they call "models," may be
popular during flush times, in spite of the feeble predictive
abilities of their "science," but they start to seem downright foolish
and feckless once the economy starts to implode. Still, these
pseudo-scientists, with their pseudo-Nobel prizes and their tenured
faculty positions, are quite entrenched, and will be difficult to
dismiss, because the fiction they spin is so much more cheerful than
the physical reality it is designed to obscure.

Add to this the fact that the financial and economic levers of control
that are available to Mr. Obama are no longer connected to anything
real. Mr. Obama's plans at economic stimulus may succeed in filling
our pockets with newly printed money, but that money will promptly
turn out to be worth its weight in kindling as soon as people try
spending it, because there is no longer any faith or credit to back it
up, and no growing economy in which to invest it. Should these
money-printing initiatives succeed in stimulating a quarter or two of
the usual anemic growth, the economy will again run into the same set
of resource constraints, cause the next spike in commodity prices,
another round of demand destruction, and economic collapse will resume
apace.

What is needed, of course, is a concerted effort to build a new,
vastly different economy, not squander remaining resources on attempts
to resuscitate the current, moribund one. But politicians are never
willing to dismantle the system that got them into power, and, like
Gorbachev before him, Obama will do all he can to restart the current
economy instead of letting it shut down and concentrating on planting
the seeds of a new one.

If Presidential authority is unlikely to do the trick, then what of
the US Congress? Even supposing that it members could betray their
friends the lobbyists who write much of the legislation they pass
without even reading it, as well as their base of well-heeled
supporters, what could they do? What they do do is legislate. Perhaps
someone might want to argue that there is a critical shortage of legal
documents in the United States, and too few lawyers to creatively
interpret them. No, if there is anything that is still in sufficient
supply, it is tortuous legalese, the minions who toil over it, and the
various courts, offices, and jails in which they toil. When it comes
to economic collapse and social disintegration, an old and venerable
legal codex is no handier than an old and venerable phone book. What
is generally needed, to preserve life and order, is to commandeer and
redistribute resources, and to compel people to do what needs to be
done, legal niceties be damned. There is no time to stand idly by and
wait while swarms of lawyers exercise their legal jowls. This calls
for men and women of action, not a deliberative body that is
accustomed to controlling the purse strings of a purse that they have
finally succeeded in emptying. The third and final branch of American
government – the judiciary – does not seem capable of the sort of
judicial activism the situation calls for, and is entirely unlikely to
try to get too far ahead of the legislative curve. So much for civics.

What, then, remains of that elusive American dream of having a
country, rather than a country club, that offers something to
everyone, and not just its most privileged members, even as the
situation becomes progressively more dire? Well, there is just one
such institution, but it is huge. I choose to call it, with all due
bombast, the Bastion of American Socialism. Not only is it a huge
institution in America itself – in fact, it is the largest, – but it
is arguably the most powerful institution on the entire planet, at
least in its destructive abilities, at least for the moment. It is the
United States military. Since it is undeniably a bastion of sorts, I
will concentrate on explaining why I think it is a socialist institution.

The various branches of the armed services provide numerous benefits
to the enlisted men and women, the officers, and the veterans. These
range from free family housing and day care to free medical care to
access technical training and to higher education. For many sons and
daughters of working class families, the military offers the only path
away from the farm, the poor neighborhood or the ghetto, and toward a
more prosperous life in the trades and even the professions. The Air
Force even provides unlimited free travel and a chance to see the
world. It is the single most socially progressive large institution
that the United States has. In a bitter twist of irony, it is also its
most brutal, designed, as it is, for politically sanctioned mass murder.

Of the working-class elderly, about the only ones who receive adequate
medical care are those who have access to the Veterans Administration
medical system. True, the services are often rationed, there are
waiting lists to see specialists, and proving that you were injured in
the line of duty often involves an exhausting paper chase. True,
certain popular ailments, such as exposure to Agent Orange and
depleted uranium, Gulf War Syndrome and the increasingly popular
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are politicized and judiciously
misdiagnosed and ignored. But this is exactly what one generally
expects to see in a system of socialized medicine.

I would like to assure everyone that I am definitely not any sort of
American military triumphalist. The American military tradition is
heir to the British one, and, as H. L. Mencken pointed out, the
Anglo-Saxon has never been known to seek out a fair fight. The British
military did its best work using rifles against pygmies armed with
ripe fruit, and using machine guns to cut down cavalry. A wealth of
racist terminology was brought to bear, to dehumanize the enemy,
making such massacres palatable: the kaffir, the jap and the gook.
They were all brutes, to be exterminated. The Americans have carried
this tradition into the nuclear age, and used a nuke or two to subdue
the Japanese, who had all the other weapons that were modern during
that era. In the other theater of that war, on the Western front, the
supposedly good fight was won by sitting it out for as long as
possible, then ponderously bombing various hitherto picturesque
historical districts of Europe in order to time the entry into Berlin
to coincide with the arrival of the Soviet troops, who had a great
deal more to lose, and could be relied upon to do all of the heavy
lifting and most of the dying. So much for valor.

It is valid to ask whether the US military, aside from its socialist
policies for those who serve it, is the least bit useful. Perhaps it
is just a colossal, incompetent public money sponge that ruins
countless lives and gives the country a bad name. In all the more
recent conflicts save one (Reagan's invasion of the island of Grenada)
the US military has not come out as the victor. Korea, Viet Nam, Gulf
Wars I and II, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia are all fiascos of one
sort or another. It can be said that the US military cannot win; it
can only blow things up. Now, blowing things up can be great fun, but
it cannot be the only element in a winning military strategy. The key
element is winning the peace, and here the US military has, time and
again, demonstrated outright incompetence, remaining stalemated and
waiting for political support to be withdrawn and the troops pulled
out and sent home.

In spite of these many failures, the US military blunders on
undeterred. This immunity to the effects of failure is also a
socialist trait: if a company does badly, the government gives it more
money and hopes for the best. This trait extends to military
contracts. For instance, Raytheon's Patriot missiles, as delivered,
would shoot down trees, apartment buildings, each other – anything but
the target. This was hushed up, and then Raytheon got more money and
told to try again. Another example: the greatest threat to the US Navy
is not any enemy, foreign or domestic, but Microsoft's Blue Screen of
Death, because their heavily computerized systems run on the
notoriously crashy Windows NT. The response is to reward Microsoft's
inability to write reliable software with more government contracts.

It is also valid to ask whether the US military, in its current highly
mechanized, mobile form, has any sort of future in a world of
dwindling oil supplies, much of them controlled by foreign
governments. The US military is currently the single largest consumer
of oil in the world, maintaining over a thousand military bases on
foreign soil, and burning prodigious amounts of fuel in resupplying
them, rotating the troops, and maintaining patrols. As fuel supplies
dwindle, these bases will have to be abandoned, and the troops
repatriated. Luckily, such extreme mobility and global reach will be
neither necessary nor desirable once the United States finds its new
place in the world as an inward-looking failed former superpower. Once
Hawaii is claimed by Japan or China, and Alaska reverts to Russian
control, the remaining United States will be a contiguous landmass
that can be traversed on foot. Thus, the US military may yet have a
bright future, as an infantry equipped with small arms, horses, mules,
bicycles and canoes.

Such a downsized military would not be able to project force halfway
across the globe on a moment's notice, but it may be able to redeploy
to a neighboring county, or even a neighboring state, by sometime next
month, provided the weather cooperates. The modest defense services it
would be able to provide would certainly be needed: the citizenry of
the United States, much more than that of most other countries, needs
to be defended from itself at all times. The number of unresolved
social conflicts, old grievances and injustices waiting to be avenged,
requires a constant police presence to be maintained at all times in
most of the thickly settled areas – a presence that will dwindle along
with municipal budgets. Add to that the already very high homicide
rate, and the huge prison population – largest in the world – that
will be released en masse once the municipal and federal funds needed
to maintain it can no longer be allocated to the purpose, and you have
a recipe for non-stop murder and mayhem. To mitigate against these
effects, federal troops can be strategically stationed in some of the
more troublesome areas. Local and state troops would be far less
effective: it has been known since Roman times that forces brought in
from another province are far more effective at quelling unrest than
those drawn from the local population.

Beyond maintaining order and preventing unnecessary bloodshed, the
military possesses a property almost unique among government agencies:
the ability to execute arbitrary orders, not subject to political
authority, not limited to job description, and not subject to
questioning, because "an order is an order!" Issuing orders is quicker
and easier than legislating, because laws are blunt instruments, and
are always subject to interpretation. Don't even try telling a lawyer
"A law is a law! Shut up!" It just doesn't work. To get things done in
an emergency, it is better to bypass lawyers and courts altogether.

One useful order would be: "Grow potatoes!" As the current system of
industrial agriculture runs out of the chemicals, fuel and credit
needed to fund and run its large-scale operations, many more hands
will suddenly be needed to operate hoes, shovels and pitchforks in
order to grow enough food to meet even the minimum caloric
requirements of the population. Although I am sure that my
gentleman-farmer friends will do their patriotic utmost to keep us all
fed, bringing to bear all that they are currently busy learning about
organic farming methods, permaculture, no-till agriculture and other
helpful techniques, having access to an organized, disciplined labor
force would help the process immeasurably.

Despite these significant positives, life under what would amount to a
military occupation, where the customary civilian rights are routinely
disregarded, and where the citizen is constantly faced with arbitrary
authority backed up by the threat of force, can hardly be described as
pleasant. But here, too, the result may be an improvement of sorts.
Since the end of the Civil War, Americans have become accustomed to
thinking of war as something that happens elsewhere, to other people.
Thus, the news that the US is bombing this or that land, for no
adequate reason, killing and maiming numerous civilians, produces in
us neither the normal human reaction of revulsion, nausea and disgust,
nor the conviction that we must take the fight to our own monstrous
leaders, lest we too become monsters. Life under domestic military
occupation might bring home some welcome realizations, and start
Americans down the long road of atoning for the sins of their
forefathers, who have run roughshod over much of the rest of the
planet for far too long. Paradoxically, as the legacy of US militarism
fades away, it may leave behind a society that is far more humane,
socialist even, than the one that gave rise to it.

[goadam1]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

The soft fascism of low expectations.

[GRG55]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

Could it be that USA now means Unlimited Socialist Aid???

For everyone...:p

GM Bailout May Mean Government Becomes Biggest Holder

It just keeps getting worse.

By the hour.

Rules? What rules...:p

U.S. Tries to Broker Sale Of Chrysler's Loan Arm

Takeover by GMAC Is Meeting Resistance

Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The Treasury Department is racing to engineer the sale of Chrysler's financing arm in a move the administration deems vital to saving the troubled automaker, but other federal agencies have not given their support, sources familiar with the matter said...

...Treasury officials have not yet obtained the agreement of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Federal Reserve, sources said. The FDIC, created to backstop the banking industry, is balking out of concern that its resources would be drained in support of an auto manufacturer. And the Fed, which regulates banks, would need to grant a waiver from a long-standing rule that separates banking and commerce...

...The dilemma over Chrysler Financial highlights the debate over the how far the government should stretch its financial rescue programs to help failing automakers. Despite reservations, regulators already anointed GMAC a bank holding company in December so it could access the federal bailout for financial companies and help preserve General Motors. Now regulators are being asked to preserve another storied American automaker.

Even if a deal is reached for Chrysler Financial, the fate of the car manufacturer remains uncertain. The Obama administration's auto industry task force and Chrysler's lenders remained in a standoff yesterday. If an agreement with the lenders cannot be reached to forgive most of their $6.9 billion in loans to the company, Chrysler is set to file for bankruptcy by Thursday, sources said...

...But if Chrysler files for bankruptcy protection, keeping Chrysler Financial afloat still remains critical to the company's future, some industry and government officials said. A collapse of the financing arm could take down many dealers, which rely on short-term loans to buy the cars that sit on their lots. Chrysler sales could also grind to a halt as consumers struggle to get car loans. In the present environment, it would be difficult for dealers and customers to get financing from banks...

[Munger]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

I know Facist is a word with bad overtones. But isn't this the definition of Facism?

Depends on what definition you are using. I tend to go with Roosevelt's, which is the opposite: corporate controlled government. Which is what we have; not as in the open as government controlled corporations though.

[Glenn Black]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

80/20 is typical, ever since Pareto did the study in the 1800's in Spain

[Scot]

Re: What Does USA Stand For?

I know Facist is a word with bad overtones. But isn't this the definition of Facism?

Fascism is more a political philosophy that advocates making the individual completely subordinate to the interests of the state and society. The individual is seen as a kind of body part in a larger organism.

It was a response to the class conflict ideas of communism, and tried to substitute the idea of class cooperation.

That's what "corporatism" means in the context of Fascism. Some groups are seen as the hands, some as the mouth, etc, but all working together, voluntarily or involuntarily, as a whole.

Of course political leaders make themselves the brain. And a body can only have one brain, right? So let the state do the thinking, or else!