Portions of this diary originally appeared in a comment in response to remarks by DKos member Otteray Scribe, who wrote this in the comments section of annieli’s diary: Trump's multi-billion dollar wall would be built to stop 56 kids.
The damn wall is not at all about immigration, keeping criminals out, or even mollifying his racist base.
The wall is about money.
These things are not exclusive.
One can pursue a program of white supremacy, and use a framework of discrimination and state-sponsored terror to generate profits.
In fact, that is textbook fascism:
Fascism is an authoritarian Nationalist political ideology that exalts nation (and often race) above the individual, and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition. It often claims to be concerned with notions of cultural decline or decadence, and seeks to achieve a national rebirth by suppressing the interests of the individual, and instead promoting cults of unity, energy and purity.
In economics, Fascism sees itself as a third way between laissez-faire Capitalism on the one hand and Communism or Socialism on the other. It acknowledges the roles of private property and the profit motive as legitimate incentives for productivity, but only insofar as they do not conflict with the interests of the state. Fascist governments tend to nationalize key industries, closely manage their currenciesand make massive state investments. They also tend to introduce price controls, wage controls and other types of economic planning measures (such as state-regulated allocation of resources, especially in the financial and raw materialssectors)…
Fascism usually involves some degree of some or all of the following elements:
- Nationalism (based on the cultural, racial and/or religious attributes of a region).
- Totalitarianism (state regulation of nearly every aspect of public and private sectors).
- Statism (state intervention in personal, social or economic matters).
- Patriotism (positive and supportive attitudes to a "fatherland").
- Autocracy (political power in the hands of a single self-appointed ruler).
- Militarism (maintaining of a strong military capability and being prepared to use it aggressively to defend or promote national interests).
- Corporatism (encouragement of unelected bodies which exert control over the social and economic life of their respective areas).
- Populism (direct appeals to the masses, usually by a charismatic leader).
- Collectivism (stress on human interdependence rather than on the importance of separate individuals).
see also:
America had long felt sympathetic to Mussolini; the Italian dictator was met with corporate conglomerates from the other side of the pond that were not only sympathetic to his plight, but were calling his transformation of Italy the “fine, young revolution.” [2] But when it came to Hitler, big business was more reserved as the German upstart was often billed behind a Socialist bill, which was very anti-capitalist. One such big name that was a fan of Hitler in the beginning was Henry Ford, but he certainly wasn’t alone. [3] Other big names that followed Hitler’s progress, even as far back as the 1920’s, included Randolph Hearst and Irenee Du Pont, even going as far as providing for him financially. [4]
This fascination with Hitler lead to many American investments in Germany; by 1930 about twenty big names in the US were connected, such as Coca-Cola, General Electric, IBM, Singer, Goodrich, and Gillette, just to name a few. But it wasn’t just corporations, because soon the banks followed, including J.P. Morgan, the Union of New York, and Sullivan & Cromwell. The most shocking of all these facts was the father of George Bush Sr., Prescott Bush, who made his fortune in Nazi contracts that later led to the president’s oil money, and financing for his presidential campaign. [5]
While American investments in the German economy did poorly during the 1930’s—as the Great Depression had devastating effects in Europe as well as the US—the corporations still profited from the political atmosphere and the low wages. Coca-cola’s production and bottling in Essen, with workers that were little more than “serfs” who were working in poor conditions with no flexibility or freedom to change jobs, and salaries that were kept artificially low by the government to entice business to be conducted there. [6] Any attempts to protest these conditions by the workers resulted in transfers to the Gestapo, or worse. Fear of being sent to concentration camps made the German workers obedient, and this continued to increase the American profits that were tied to Hitler’s country. [7]
Neither white supremacy nor the exploitation of workers to maximize profits are sole motives for the fascist— they are intertwined, in part because the political dominance an autocratic regime seeks requires socioeconomic dominance.
John Bellamy Foster provides a useful dissection of the emergence of the GOP fascist enterprise:
Not only a new administration, but a new ideology has now taken up residence at the White House: neofascism. It resembles in certain ways the classical fascism of Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, but with historically distinct features specific to the political economy and culture of the United States in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. This neofascism characterizes, in my assessment, the president and his closest advisers, and some of the key figures in his cabinet.2From a broader sociological perspective, it reflects the electoral bases, class constituencies and alignments, and racist, xenophobic nationalism that brought Donald Trump into office. Neofascist discourse and political practice are now evident every day in virulent attacks on the racially oppressed, immigrants, women, LBGTQ people, environmentalists, and workers. These have been accompanied by a sustained campaign to bring the judiciary, governmental employees, the military and intelligence agencies, and the press into line with this new ideology and political reality.
Who forms the social base of the neofascist phenomenon? As a Gallup analysis and CNN exit polls have demonstrated, Trump’s electoral support came mainly from the intermediate strata of the population, i.e., from the lower middle class and privileged sections of the working class, primarily those with annual household incomes above the median level of around $56,000. Trump received a plurality of votes among those with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 a year, especially in the $50,000 to $99,999 range, and among those without college degrees. Of those who reported that their financial situation was worse than four years earlier, Trump won fully 77 percent of the vote.3 An analysis by Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell of Gallup, updated just days before the election, indicated that in contrast to standard Republican voters, much of Trump’s strongest support came from relatively privileged white male workers within “skilled blue collar industries”…
Nationally, Trump won the white vote and the male vote by decisive margins, and had his strongest support among rural voters. Both religious Protestants and Catholics favored the Republican presidential candidate, but his greatest support of all (80 percent) came from white evangelical Christians. Veterans also went disproportionately for Trump. Among those who considered immigration the nation’s most pressing issue, Trump, according to CNN exit polls, received 64 percent of the vote; among those who ranked terrorism as the number-one issue, 57 percent.6 Much of the election was dominated by both overt and indirect expressions of racism, emanating not only from the Republican nominee but also from his close associates and family (and hardly nonexistent among the Democrats themselves). Donald Trump, Jr., in what was clearly a political ploy, repeatedly tweeted Nazi-style white supremacist slogans aimed at the far right…
The clear implication was that Trump’s supporters conformed to the same general pattern. According to the Hamilton study, it is generally believed that “the lower middle class (or petty bourgeoisie) provided the decisive support for Hitler and his party.”9 Hitler also drew on a minority of the working class, disproportionately represented by more privileged blue-collar workers. But the great bulk of his support came from the lower middle class or petty bourgeoisie, representing a staunchly anti-working class, racist, and anti-establishment outlook—which nevertheless aligned itself with capital. Hitler also received backing from devout Protestants, rural voters, disabled veterans, and older voters or pensioners.10
The parallels with the Trump phenomenon in the United States are thus sufficiently clear. Trump’s backing comes primarily neither from the working-class majority nor the capitalist class—though the latter have mostly reconciled themselves to Trumpism, given that they are its principal beneficiaries. Once in power, fascist movements have historically cleansed themselves rapidly of the more radical lower-middle-class links that helped bring them to power, and soon ally themselves firmly with big business—a pattern already manifesting itself in the Trump administration.11
Yet despite these very broad similarities, key features distinguish neofascism in the contemporary United States from its precursors in early twentieth-century Europe. It is in many ways a unique form, sui generis. There is no paramilitary violence in the streets. There are no black shirts or brown shirts, no Nazi Stormtroopers. There is, indeed, no separate fascist party.12 Today the world economy is dominated not by nation-based monopoly capitalism, as in classical fascism, but a more globalized monopoly-finance capitalism.
I disagree with Bellamy’s statement There is no paramilitary violence in the streets. There are no black shirts or brown shirts, no Nazi Stormtroopers.
I’d suggest that African-Americans would say they have been subject to paramilitary violence by white supremacists, unabated, for centuries, sometimes by those wearing badges. And ICE certainly seems to be functioning in the role of the brown shirts/Gestapo in sending refugees to internment camps and kidnapping their children.
That is, I’d suggest it is evident at this point that Bellamy’s distinction between ‘classical fascism’ and ‘neofascism’ (he wrote this a year ago) is ultimately spurious— under the guise of the sham ideology of ‘conservatism’, and through the instrument of the GOP (a putatively ‘mainstream’ political party), fascists seized power, and then dropped all pretense and camouflage. They are simply fascists in the classical sense, no qualification necessary.
The money is good in crimes against humanity. It always was:
Hitler's Willing Business Partners
You are Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, and you face a choice. Hitler has just come to power in Germany, and you are considering whether to direct your German subsidiary, Dehomag, to bid for the job of tabulating the results of a census the Nazi government wants to conduct. While you are making up your mind in your New York office, the local papers swell with stories of anti-Semitic outrages committed by that government. On March 18, 1933, The New York Times reports that the Nazis have ousted all Jewish professionals—lawyers, doctors, teachers—from their jobs. A front-page story under the headline "German Fugitives Tell of Atrocities at Hands of Nazis" describes Brown Shirts dragging Jews out of a Berlin restaurant and forcing them to run a gauntlet of kicks and blows such that the face of the last man through "resembled a beefsteak." Other stories tell of Jews being forced to clean the streets with toothbrushes, of book burnings, of 10,000 refugees fleeing Germany, and of 30,000 people—Jews, political prisoners, gays, and others—imprisoned in concentration camps. On March 27, virtually outside your window on Broadway, a crowd of more than 50,000 at a Madison Square Garden mass rally demands that American firms boycott Nazi Germany. In these circumstances, with this knowledge, will you, Thomas Watson, bid for the census contract?…
The Holocaust, Black stipulates, would have occurred with or without the Hollerith tabulating machines and punch cards IBM/Dehomag leased to the Nazis. But he raises the important if ultimately unanswerable question of whether Hitler's destruction of the Jews would have happened as rapidly and claimed as many victims without the harvest of deadly information recorded by the Hollerith machines, on IBM punch cards, by IBM/Dehomag employees working for the Nazi death bureaucracy. On the efficiency question, he provocatively contrasts Holland and France. The Nazis ordered censuses in both countries soon after they were occupied. In Holland, a country with "a well-entrenched Hollerith infrastructure," out of "an estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews, more than 107,000 were deported, and of those 102,000 were murdered—a death ratio of approximately 73 percent." In France, where the "punch card infrastructure was in complete disarray," of the estimated 300,000 to 350,000 Jews in both German-occupied and Vichy zones, 85,000 were deported, of whom around 3,000 survived. "The death ratio for France was approximately 25 percent."…
Perhaps Hitler could have taken over Watson's "operation" years earlier. And suppose Hitler had, shouldn't Watson have been willing to write his assets off? He could have justified that step to his stockholders on the strongest moral grounds in all history. And remember: he was not selling widgets to the Nazis but a product that could patently further the proclaimed racialist aims of the regime (The Times ran anti-Semitic selections from Mein Kampf on its front page within months of Hitler's taking control of the government). That information is power was and remains the theory of IBM's business. Black's question "How did they get the names?" indicates the maleficent use to which the power of information was put.
(Note the date of the NYT headline, by the way: "German Fugitives Tell of Atrocities at Hands of Nazis"— 1933. Don’t let anyone, EVER, claim the world, and every single German, didn’t know what they were getting with Hitler, or what was happening six years before the invasion of Poland. The Germans got exactly what they wanted with Hitler, just as rank and file GOP voters are getting precisely what they knowingly voted for with Putin’s tool.)
The crimes against humanity are part and parcel of the fascist project.
Those who made a fortune doing business with Hitler and Mussolini knew what their goods and services were for. The same is true of those that run for profit internment camps, and those that want to be paid to build the wall:
An examination of Sterling Construction Company, the only publicly traded company to receive a contract to build a border wall prototype, reveals that Trump-connected Wall Street investors from across the political spectrum stand to benefit financially from the wall.
Investors in Sterling include far-right funder Robert Mercer and his firm Renaissance Technologies, as well as BlackRock and JP Morgan Chase, led by Democratic donors Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon, respectively. Sterling’s prototype contract appears to already be benefiting its shareholders by helping to drive up its share price to the highest levels in years.
These financial ties raise questions about whether there is a growing alignment between the financial elite and the far right, and whether such an alignment will strengthen right-wing forces. In addition to the wall, all of the top investors described in this report are also invested in one or both of the country’s top private prison companies, CoreCivic and Geo Group, which spend millions lobbying while benefiting from the expansion of immigration detention. (emphasis added)
Separating the economic motive from the fascist white supremacist program is not only an error factually, it is the mendacious basis for those that would seek to absolve themselves of their complicity in the commission of atrocities.