Understanding the Face of Fascism in the Midst of a Financial Meltdown

Leaving out the Keynesian Sixth 'C'

November 3, 2008 (LPAC)--While invoking the honored name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, yesterday's Sunday Telegraph--a.k.a. the 'Torygraph,' proposes a series of decidedly non-FDR, pro-Keynesian measures a new President of the U.S. should take. The proposal focuses on "the five Cs: capital, credit, confidence, change (of the regulatory variety) and closure," while managing to leave out the all-important sixth "C". Now that the bailout is under way, the new President should create "a climate of confidence" in the financial markets, and restructure the "outdated and outmoded" regulatory system by creating "one super-regulator" attached to the Fed.

These measures are explicitly fascist, which leads us to the unspoken sixth "C", for CORPORATISM. John Maynard Keynes, later Baron Keynes, explicitly endorsed fascist economics in the preface to his 1937 German-language edition of his "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money." Keynes wrote in his foreword that his theory were best "adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state," an admission which was not included in the English-language versions of his book. It is this overtly fascist Keynesian view that the British are pushing under the guise of a New Bretton Woods, in direct opposition to a return to the nation-building philosophy of FDR. One could truthfully argue that the British approach is actually the three Cs, corruption, criminality, and corporatism.

For more on the 6th C, check out LPACTV: What is Corporatism?