[lbo-talk] More on Obama and Facsism

James Leveque leveque.james at gmail.com
Fri Sep 18 16:31:54 PDT 2009


I'm just throwing this out there to see what kind of responses I get. Some former Bush official compared Obama's economic policies to Hitler and Peron. I'm less interested in her confused reading of Obama's policies than her stated "definition" of fascism.

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/09/former-bush-administration-official-warns-against-economic-fascism-under-obama.php?ref=fpblg

"when you look at the definition of fascism. Fascism is not government ownership of business, it is government control of business."

This is a subject I've become recently really interested in (so, hence, I don't know a lot about it.), but my feeling is that economics is a problematic way to define fascism because economic policies weren't well defined under the fascists. Consequently, what Germany was doing economically wasn't what Italy was doing, which was different from some other regime like the Falangists. But capitalist businesses largely flourished under fascism. That being said, it seems like most fascist regimes weren't above regulation by any means, as long as the regulation subordinated business to the fascist party. Is this at least somewhat accurate?

James Leveque



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