Real Campaign Finance Reform - To End Fascism

“The Republicans are 95 percent corrupt and the Democrats are 75 percent corrupt,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. “They are accepting money from the same corporations. And of course, that is going to corrupt you.”

Speaking about his book, Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy, Kennedy said, “There is no difference between the reaction I get from Republicans and Democrats, because Americans share the same values. If you talk about these issues in terms of our national values, everybody understands it.”

In the book, Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and that the Bush White House has learned key lessons from other historically repressive regimes.

“While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business,” he writes. “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?”

He quotes Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels: “It is always simply a matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. 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.”

Kennedy then adds: “The White House has clearly grasped the lesson.”

Kennedy also quotes Benito Mussolini’s insight that “fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

“The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power,” Kennedy said. “There is vogue in the White House to talk about the threat of big government. But since the beginning of our national history, our most visionary political leaders have warned the American public against the domination of government by corporate power. That warning is missing in the national debate right now. Because so much corporate money is going into politics, the Democratic Party itself has dropped the ball. They just quash discussion about the corrosive impact of excessive corporate power on American democracy.”

(Excerpted from Kennedy: Fascist America by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman.)