Rick Perry for President

America, it has been said, is on its way to becoming a Fascist state. This depends on the definition. The WW2 dictator Benito Mussolini said: “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power”.

Rick Perry at Iowa State Fair, Aug 22, 2011

(CALGARY, Alberta) - In an August 25 column in the New York Times, David Brooks said “It’s time to take Perry seriously. He could be our next president.”.

Being reasonable and progressive has little traction in American politics these days. But I’m not giving up; I just see the writing on the wall. The American people are going to have to be driven to their knees and their faces ground into the dirt, before they realize how they have been fooled.

Some conservatives reading this are no doubt smiling to themselves as they think they’ve finally won! But it turns out they have not only not won, but their loss is greater because they actually believe that, in supporting the rich, they were somehow helping themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith said many years ago in The Affluent Society:

“The test of the good liberal is still that he is never fooled, that he never yields on issues favoring the wealthy. Other questions occupy his active attention, but this is the constant. Behind him, always challenging him, is the cynical Marxian whisper hinting that whatever he does may not be enough. Despite his efforts, the wealthy will become wealthier and more powerful. They lose battles but win wars.”

Democracy and the American people can still win the future. But first, they will have to go through the fire.

Some history

The Great Depression was a true watershed for the American people; not only was there great suffering and deprivation, but FDR offered great hope and delivered on that promise. In his 1936 Madison Garden speech (available on the web) just before the election he said:

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage of their own affairs [Sound familiar?]. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” (emphasis added)

By the end of Truman’s presidency, Republican leaders had, as a matter of political pragmatism, accepted the institutions created by the New Deal as permanent features of the American scene. In a 1954 letter to his brother Edgar, President Eisenhower said:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is small and they are stupid.” (italics added)

Dying in 1969, Eisenhower did not live to see his words gainsaid.

I am reminded visually of the Disney version of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice where Mickey Mouse is overwhelmed by the magical brooms and finally, in desperation, chops them into splinters. After that, however, the splinters come together to reconstitute themselves into a new water carrying broom.

And so it is with the splinter group Eisenhower decried.

Conservative multi-millionaires started funding “think tanks” in the 1970s, like Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute and the Hudson Institute. People were financially supported and educated in conservative principles to fan out into the public and private sectors to promote conservatism in whatever ways they could. Ironically, they did not do Nixon a lot of good because he governed, in many ways, as a liberal. For example, he established the Environmental Protection Agency, something contemporary conservatives would like to dismantle.

One of institutes was the “Leadership Institute” founded in 1979 by conservative activist Morton C. Blackwell. Its mission is to "increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists" and to "identify, train, recruit and place conservatives in politics, government, and media." Since its founding, the Leadership Institute has trained more than 91,000 students. Notable alumni are Grover Norquist and Karl Rove.

Neither man has held elected office, but each has had influence far greater than most politicians, Karl Rove as the eminence grise behind George W. Bush and Grover Norquist as president of Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist also worked behind the scenes in helping Bush get elected in 2000 and was instrumental in crafting the Bush tax cuts.

He says, “my goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” and to take America back to “the McKinley era, absent the protectionism,” to the way it was before “Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.” He is a major ideological impetus behind the Tea Party movement.

(I can’t resist a comment on his “death tax”. There is a well known law of nature that says: You can’t take it with you.. So, if the government, meaning the rest of the people in the country, want to reabsorb what they leave behind and apply it to benefit the commonweal, what’s wrong with that? After all, it doesn’t belong to the people he leaves behind, they didn’t earn it!)

The Reagan Revolution for the Rich

The convergence of the new conservatism began with Ronald Reagan who was not, says Paul Krugman,

”…a paragon of high-minded conservative principles…nothing of the sort. His early political successes were based on appeals to cultural and sexual anxieties, playing on the fear of communism, and, above all, tacit exploitation of white backlash against the civil rights movement and its consequences.”

He opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act—calling the latter “humiliating to the South” and ran for governor of California in part on a promise to repeal the state’s fair housing act. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house,” Reagan said, “he has a right to do so.”

As a conservative, Reagan displayed a typical callousness. “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night,” he said, referring to one of John F. Kennedy’s campaign lines. “Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

Reagan also did his best to reverse Nixon’s environmental achievements, slashing the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency and gutting its enforcement activities. His first secretary of the interior, James Watt, was a fervent antienvironmentalist with strong ties to the religious right who quintupled the amount of public land open to coal mining.

In 1985, historian Stephanie Coontz wrote a critique of how the Democrats had been completely overwhelmed by the predatory capitalism unleashed by the Reagan Administration:

“It’s instructive to make a list of recent chairmen of the law-drafting committees of the [American Bar Association] and of the clients they have represented: the Chairman of the Committee on Environmental Controls was a lawyer for Humble Oil and General Motors; the Drug Law Committee was headed by an employee of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association; the Aviation Law Committee by an Eastern Airlines executive; the Committee on Railroads by the vice-president and general counsel of Gulf Mobile and Ohio Railroad Company; the Section on Anti-Trust Laws by an IBM and Shell oil executive; the Section on Public Utility Law by an AT&T employee, the Beverage Law Committee by a lawyer for Coca-Cola.”

The Bush Push

Even building on the Reagan foundation and the subsequent impotence of eight Clinton years, George W. Bush wasn’t able to complete the conservative dominance in his two terms, but he laid more substantial groundwork which President Perry should be able to nearly complete. (Barack Obama, potentially, could have stemmed, even reversed the tide, but it turns out (so far) he’s a lover not a fighter—no FDR, he.)

There are readers and posters who come here and talk about how conservatives are winning and taking everything under their control. But they obviously don’t read or take history into account. Their day will come and it will not be a pleasant day!

In the 1930s, Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) wrote a famous summary about the passivity of German intellectuals after the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group. He was arrested in 1937 and eventually confined in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps until his release by the Allies in 1945.

Its exact date of first writing is not known and several versions have since appeared, but this is recognized as the basic idea.

First They Came… by Martin Niemöller First they came for the communists and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists but I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me

A contemporary version for American conservatives would be something like this:

First they came for the poor,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t poor.

Then they came for the humanists and liberals,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a humanist or a liberal.

Then they came for the union workers,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a union worker.

Then they came for the rank and file conservative, those who don’t believe in government, global warming, evolution or the law of gravity,

And there was no one left to speak for me, so I was swept up in the totalitarianism of the New America.

Not a New Idea

The decline of America into a form of dictatorship is not a new idea. One predictor was the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein in a novelette he first serialized in 1940 in Astounding Science-Fiction and revised and expanded for inclusion in the 1953 collection Revolt in 2100.

Although not a complete theocracy, the American people are going to have to be driven to their knees and have their faces ground into the dirt, before they realize how they have been manipulated and fooled.

America, it has been said, is on its way to becoming a Fascist state. This depends on the definition. The WW2 Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said: “Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power”.

That will be America after 2012.

Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Daniel Johnson as a teenager aspired to be a writer. Always a voracious reader, he reads more books in a month than many people read in a lifetime. He knew early that in order to be a writer, you have to be a reader.

Another early bit of self-knowledge was that writers need experience. So, in the first seven years after high school he worked at 42 different jobs ranging from management trainee in a bank (four branches in three cities), inside and outside jobs at a railroad (in two cities), then A & W, factories and assembly lines, driving cabs (three different companies), collection agent, a variety of office jobs, John Howard Society, crisis counsellor at an emergency shelter, salesman in a variety of industries (building supplies, used cars, photocopy machines)and on and on. You get the picture.

In 1968, he was between jobs and eligible for unemployment benefits, so he decided to take the winter off and just write. The epiphany there, he said, was that after about two weeks, “I realized I had nothing to say.” So back to regular work.

He has always been concerned about fairness in the world and the plight of the underprivileged/underdog. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that he understood where that motivation came from. Diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) he researched the topic and, among others, read a book Scattered Minds by Dr. Gabor Maté, an ADD person himself. Maté wrote: "[A] feeling of duty toward the whole world is not limited to ADD but is typical of it. No one with ADD is without it."

That explains his motivation. Hard-wired.

As a professional writer he sold his first paid article in 1974 and, while employed at other jobs, started selling a few pieces in assorted places. He created his first journalism gig. In the late 1970s, when the world was recovering from a recession, the Canadian federal government had a job creation program where, if an employer created a new job, the government would pay part of the wage for the first year or two. The local weekly paper was growing, so he approached the publisher and said this was an opportunity for him to hire a new reporter. The publisher had been thinking along those lines but cost was a factor. No longer.

Over the next 15 years, Daniel eked out a living as a writer doing, among other things, national writing and both radio and TV broadcasting for the CBC, Maclean’s (the national newsmagazine) and a host of smaller publications. Interweaved throughout this period was soul-killing corporate and public relations writing.

It was through the 1960s and 1970s that he got his university experience. In his first year at the University of Calgary, he majored in psychology/mathematics; in his second year he switched to physics/mathematics. He then learned of an independent study program at the University of Lethbridge where he attended the next two years, studying philosophy and economics. In the end he attended university over nine years (four full time) but never qualified for a degree because he didn't have the right number of courses in any particular field.

In 1990 he published his first (and so far, only) book: Practical History: A guide to Will and Ariel Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” (Polymath Press, Calgary)

Newly appointed as the Deputy Executive Editor in August 2011, he has been writing exclusively for Salem-News.com since March 2009 and, as of summer 2011, has published more than 150 stories.

He continues to work on a second book which he began in 1998.

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