Portland:

Wenn es wie eine Stormtruppen gebt

Wenn is wie eine Stormtruppen gesprache

es ist eine fascistiche

The aspect of the current regime in Washington is fascist. I say “aspect” since, once certain milestones are reached, whether they will remain that way remains to be seen. Mr Bushmills and I asked that question in November, 2008; what direction would this bunch go…Euro-style, “hot tub” socialism, harsher “get even” social-leaning-to-commun-ism, or plain old rapacious thug-style rob-the-treasury banditry, which always looks a lot like fascism?

First of all, under the rubric of “power”, the EU as currently organized is more fascist than socialist, when it first began developing in the post-war era. Power engenders one or the other, a totalitarian regime that gets along with a “licensed” private sector, or a totalitarian regime that owns it outright. As far as I am concerned, the operative constant there is “totalitarian”, the rest academic hair-splitting.

The health care debate is indicative of rifts inside the Democrat party, just as Germany in 1930s, between fascists (who were willing, even desirous) of making deals with the private sector, and communists, who wanted the state to take it all. There’s not much history as to which side wins these contests on ideology alone, but when accounting for ordinary human behavior, greed, power-hunger, etc., we know a lot; goons with guns usually win out over smarty-pants, still in their bathrobes in Mom’s basement, making protest signs, and penning vicious attack-blogs on the internet.

The problem that confronts us is to be able to identify this aspect, publicize it, make it more known and let the victims in on who’s next, as not just a declining economy, but one being transformed..without appearing to talk down the economy, or worse, appear to be hoping things gets worse, as to a way to generate more anti-government support. First, sit back and do the math. The economy simply cannot come back to the sorts of numbers we saw in 2006, nor is it intended to.

One of the Obama czars, I’m not good with names, said earlier in the year that the GNP needed to decline about 25%…permanently. I have to take him at his word, until proven otherwise, for even Vassar and I can envision how you can pull that off without calling up the stark imagery of the Great Depression, with Dust Bowls, Okies and Steinbeck, bread lines and hobo camps. No matter how bad it gets, the state will make every effort to create the appearance of normalcy, even good times, and with a compliant press, greedy advertising media, they will be able to complete the tapestry much better than FDR ever dreamed.

The way the fascists did it and what we are seeing now is to highlight the upper end of society, the good times, so that people, in their day-to-day treks back and forth to work, in their newspapers, their theater, radio, magazines, will believe things have changed very little. After all, even at 20% unemployment (and we’re nearing that overall), 80% will be employed. Even FDR knew how to do this during almost the entire decade of the 30’s, making people think things had improved when in fact they hadn’t. We went into the 1940 draft at about the same unemployment rate it had been in 1934, 17%.

It was illusion, and it will be again, and we won’t be able to do a thing about it…not when everyone out here is in it for themselves…which is what hard times brings about. If the pie is shrinking, most people, rather than notice that the “have’s” have been re-allocated to the state class, the public sector, will be struggling to get what in fact are little more than table scraps being tossed their way. We see this all the time in the third world. It’s the sine qua non of the United Nations General Assembly.

Last year we asked people to take note of the skyline along the way back and forth to work, then compare that with television advertising.  Billboars that are down, Shops that have closed, Vacant strip malls. For Sale signs in neighborhoods. In out talks to small business, we use the 20% benchmark as a way to sit down and guesstimate anything, from how many small businesses have gone out of business, by business-line, to manufacturing, to how many storefronts along the way to work have closed shop. I use 20% as a conservative, but attainable goal for this regime, for they can pick around the edges and make 20% look more like 10% rather easily. They are already doing this with GNP, by fudging state spending as a compensation for private investment. In truth, we are probably still in recession, or close to it.

The stock market is down by about 20%, and many experts agree that the 10,000 range will be it’s new ceiling for awhile. No one has noted how many companies have dropped off NYSE and NASDAQ, but I’d wager around 15%-20%, so I expect share volume to be down commensurate with that. In all likelihood, the total value of shares traded on Wall Street are also down around those same parameters.

The idea is to make 10,000 seem “up there” rather then “down there” and since no one can be bought as quickly as a Wall Street talking head, the internet, journals and financial television are already filled with their optimism. The Big Rock Candy Mountain is just around the corner.

By appending the health care system to the state, it will have grabbed control of more than 20% of the US economy, including automobile manufacturing, hence, a major stake in gasoline/oil, steel, as well as financial markets and housing, where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will continue to define that market, as well as serve as a Democrat Party tithe to the Congressional Black Caucus. FM & FM are as close to high crimes and misdemeanors as have been perpetrated on the American people since the Rosenbergs sold the Russians the A-Bomb.

It’s small business that is being hammered, and this in intentional. When we talk to small business, we ask them to lay out on a piece of paper all the companies in their local market they compete with, by marketshare, but also by total revenues. Then, with a red pencil, line out 20% of the value of that market. Who will be first companies to fall by the wayside? Probably as many as 30%-40% of the companies will fail, since usually, the list is weighted with small mom & pop companies vying for that bottom ten-twenty percent of the market. The surviving more prominent companies will gobble up the excess, some even showing growth, disguising the catastrophe at the bottom. Almost no one will notice, except for those families directly affected.

What is key to fascism, is that over time, say ten years, the companies in this business line will continue to constrict even more, only the criteria for success will no longer be those who offers the best service, the best product, price value, but who is selected by government to have that business thrown their way. It will be a competition for the government’s (State, federal and local) favor, not the customers’. “Being licensed” will take on a wholly new meaning, for it will imply “state approval”.

This process is gradual…so gradual that almost no one, going to work, will notice the small office that has closed in this industrial park, or that strip mall. The only ones who will notice will be families who lost their source of income from that job, but who, thank God (or Obama), will have free health care, and some talk of a state job in some infrastructure project in a rural county 150 miles away.

Having worked in China for years, we knew that a key to designing plants or production systems for the Chicoms was to “labor intensify” it. E.g., A plant or process designed to employ 40 people had to be redesigned to employ 120. With that image in your mind, imagine the money someone can make by making shovels and picks as they replace the backhoe and D3 ‘dozer so as to provide employment on county road gangs, to accommodate all those laid off workers. And a few may even qualify for the new civilian militia…after strict testing, of course.

But back home, on television, it will appear as nothing has changed. There will still be car insurance ads, only 80% of the people who could once afford a car will still have one. There will still be resorts, in Arizona, the Caribbean, two people in tubs toasting Viagra or Corona…only no one will notice that approximately 20% of the resorts have closed, or that the demographics of just who’s traveling these days have changed from small businessmen in Corvallis to state managers in Salem.

There will still be ads for McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Coca Cola, Coors, Bud Light, but no one will notice the number of locations that have been closed across the country, or the fewer number of new franchises. No one will notice the drop off in sales and attendance to sports bars. Franchising as a whole, and in a variety of select categories will see (or have already seen) a drop in sales. Coke, like to cockroach, will survive, but Hardees?…check your mail.

Then there are the Leftists’ wish lists. For instance, mass transit, and reducing suburbia and returning much of it back to nature, both environmentalist dreams. We predicted some American suburbs will be Mugabe-ized, where homes will first be foreclosed, then sold to gutter trash, who will in turn trash the whole neighborhood, then make it so uninhabitable it has to be bulldozed…or maybe pitch-forked. (This fate awaits some of Detroit already.) Why wait for messy condemnation suits, (Kelo), when smell and rubbish alone can clear a neighborhood much quicker? This is reverse red-lining.

The environmentalist Left want this to occur very badly, as moving people out of mid-range suburban homes, approximately 20% to start, and moving them into a newer, better Cabrini Green-like villages near tramway/rail stations, was always the plan. Of course, the Left thinks it has figured out all the problems that went wrong when they moved people into high-rise complexes before, such as moving in a better  (middle) class of people. But having been to Eastern Europe, that is problematic.

I try not to be long-winded like my good friend Vassar. He could go on forever about a subject like this. But you can do the math yourself. Just cut everything by 20%, then figure out how it shakes out. Only mind the way it will shake out over say 10 years, and consider the power angle. The target right now is small business, the private sector working class. They will wait til last to begin peeling back those aspects of society people associate with “everything is all right”…Hollywood, professional sports, and finally, the establishment poor.

Collegiate and high school sports will change as attendance and advertising revenues will change. Title IX university budgets (for sports that actually produce no income) will be cut back, 2 to 1 male to female programs. The NCAA may fold, in favor or a new type of sports federations…I doubt they”ll go so far as to call then Dynamo and Spartika…but athletics will become over years more a sport for the political class in the stadium, and the masses at home on the teley.

Obviously, superstar sports salaries will fall (still several years away) but many of the national sports heroes will become “properties” of the state, as Max Schmeling was, or every Soviet Olympic medalist since 1956, so they can still live large within their status as gods. Unless our government goes all in as the Third Reich and DDR did (which I doubt), trying to magnify American athleticism as a kind of return to the magnificence of the gods, the actually quality of sport in America will fall, causing many people to lose interest altogether at the national level. Many sports will return to sandlot-type operations. It’s anybody’s guess which will go first, but my own polling show most people think it will be baseball, the MLB brand actually moving to the Caribbean some day.

Finally, there is the established under-class. You have to revisit the old Frankie Yankovic classic, to appreciate the fact that fascists always save the biggest lie for last. In Obama’s heaven there is no bling.

Sing it children, sing it loud.

Wenn es wie eine Stormtruppen waddlen

Wenn is wie eine Stormtruppen quacken

es ist eine fascistiche

Bernard Chumm