“Democratic Dictatorship”: The Transition towards Authoritarian Rule in America ~ By Dr. Robert P. Abele

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To demonstrate this rapid movement in U.S. government, we will use as a base Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” address to Congress, on January 6, 1941. By all rights, and regardless of FDR’s real intent (some say it was to garner support for U.S. involvement in WWII), very few would doubt that his elucidated four freedoms form an important base for understanding liberal democracy. Here are FDR’s own words, quoted at length:

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception—the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.”

This technology and these practices are not limited to the federal level, either. Now local police use the same spying programs and practices as their federal mentors have done. In fact, the “trickle down” of totalitarian technology and practice has infiltrated local police departments. The Washington Post reports (December 8) that local police departments now have technology to obtain what are called cell phone “tower dumps” from all telecommunication companies that use the towers. Additionally, police agencies are using fake cell phone towers to simply collect data, period. None of this information collection is done with warrants. This means that local police now randomly collect all cell phone information, including GPS location information, email addresses, and web sites.

According to USA Today, this is being done by local police in 33 states. 

 But there is a second, even more alarming conclusion that we must draw from this. It was summarized poignantly by Judge Richard J. Leon, who ruled that the NSA’s collection of metadata from phones is “almost Orwellian,” stating forthrightly that the U.S. government had failed to cite “a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack.” Couple this judgment with the ruling of Judge Reggie Walton (referenced by Judge Leon), that the NSA was in “systematic noncompliance” with the Federal Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court.

 For example, both Democrat Senator Diane Feinstein, and Republican Representative Mike Rogers have publicly claimed that “we are not safer now than we were a year ago,” and that “terror is up worldwide” (both of these quotations come from their appearance on the CNN program “State of the Union,” on December 1). However, when one examines the facts, the total number of deaths that have been classified as “terrorist-related” in 2011 was nine, and six of those were from the lone shooter who murdered worshippers at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Likewise, the FBI has listed a total of nine terrorist incidents on U.S. soil, less than half what they were in 2011. The scare statistics are instead drawn from four countries in which terrorist activities have been on the rise: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Syria. This shows clearly that Feinstein and Rogers are lying when they make their claims. Could it be that this is due to the fact that both of their spouses are deeply involved in “private security” contracts with the U.S. military and State Department? (Bill Van Auken, “U.S. Congressional Intelligence Chiefs Promote Terror Scare,” World Socialist Web Site, December 6, 2012).
Roosevelt’s Third Freedom: Freedom from want, especially economic want.

 For the second fact, compare these obscene salaries with the normal U.S. household, whose income has fallen by approximately ten percent over the past ten years. In fact, according to a report by the Southern Education Foundation, nearly half of public school children in the U.S. are now poor, where “poor” is defined as an annual income of $29,000 for a family of four. Additionally, the report states, of the 45 wealthiest countries in the world, the U.S. ranks second in the level of child poverty rate. If that isn’t enough, with the lack of congressional action for the unemployed, benefits for over one million of the unemployed will expire next week. This news comes as the Federal Reserve continues to add $85 billion per month into the financial system, in order to keep Wall Street profits at a maximum.
While the corporate mentality propagandizes that the destitute are “parasites” on the body politic, corporate millionaires in the fast food industry have conspired to take taxpayer money both “from the top” and “from the bottom.” According to the report “Fast Food CEO’s Rake in Taxpayer-Subsidized Pay,” the CEO’s of these corporations—KFC, Taco Bell, McDonalds, and Pizza Hut named among them—have created and used a tax loophole to let themselves deduct performance-based executive pay from their taxes, so that the higher the CEO salary under this category, the less tax they pay. This is “from the top” of the tax monies. “From the bottom” is the fact that fast food corporations like McDonald’s pay their employees such low wages that the employees need government programs like the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) to feed their families. In fact, McDonald’s has a program that assists its employees to get on the food stamp and welfare programs, thus taking taxpayer money to fund the wage gap that they have deliberately created.
Of course, this class inequality is insufficiently wide for the elites. Thus, there are several other actions they have planned in order to widen the class divide in America and to consolidate their complete economic and political power. First, according to a report in The Guardian, their main lobbying group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is now planning a 34-state assault on education, health, tax, worker compensation, and the environment (Ed Pilkington and Suzanne Goldenberg, “State Conservative Groups Plan U.S.-wide Assault on Education, Health, and Tax,” The Guardian, December 5, 2013).
Second, workers are seeing their pensions slashed. The test cases for this assault on the politically unrepresented, helpless class are in Detroit and Chicago. In an excellent analysis of the Detroit bankruptcy issue, Wallace Turbeville argues that the real crisis in Detroit has absolutely nothing to do with pensions or expenses. Rather, the real problem lies in numerous other factors, including “emergency manager” Kevyn Orr’s shady accounting, revenue reductions, state revenue sharing, corporate subsidies, and most of all, questionable financial dealings in such things as interest rate swaps. All of this contributed to the city’s cash flow problem, while the city’s pension contributions and expenses remained relatively stable (Wallace Turbeville, “The Detroit Bankruptcy,”)
In Chicago, corporate Democrat Rahm Emauel announced his plan to entirely eliminate health insurance subsidies for retired city workers, effective on January 1, 2017. This will place far more financial burden on the workers by increasing their premiums, eliminating subsidies, cutting retired workers from the city’s health care plan, and requiring employees to purchase insurance through the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare.” However, like Detroit, worker pensions are not the problem. Rather, the deficits have been created by reducing tax rates on the wealthy and by raiding pensions, among other things, all with union backing.

 Fourth, while Obama’s speech on inequality on December 4 was crafted to make him appear as the great defender of equality, in point of fact Obama has done everything in his power to maintain a distinct inequality in society, doing his corporate master’s bidding all the way. While these examples are not exhaustive, the following will suffice to indicate support for this claim. First, Obama’s restructuring of the auto industry in 2009 was done precisely to cut wages and benefits to the workers. In that same year he intervened to prevent legislation directed at blocking executive bonuses at various bailed-out banks and insurance companies. Additionally, he has rejected providing federal assistance to states and cities hit hard by the economic crisis, while continuing to pump money into the very banks and Wall Street companies that crashed the economy in 2008. While the average income for average Americans has fallen by several percentage points during his tenure, Obama has failed to advocate strongly for a fair increase in the minimum wage. Simultaneously, he heralds education for all, while cutting Head Start programs from his budget and advocating corporate-owned schools in his “Race to the Top” education program.

 Roosevelt’s Fourth Freedom: Freedom from fear, especially from military aggression.

 In this examination of U.S. military aggression worldwide, we have not even mentioned the numerous drone strikes that President Obama has ordered and continues to order and publicly support, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen, to name but three prominent places. This practice of asymmetric remote-control war shows only signs of increasing in U.S. practice in years to come.
Putting this militarism into perspective, Chalmers Johnson warned in his book Nemesis that we can either have an Empire (i.e. abroad) or we can have a democracy, but we cannot have both. I have been arguing that FDR’s Four Freedoms is a good synopsis of what the side of having a democracy truly means, and arguing that Totalitarianism at home is at least morally equivalent to Empire abroad.

the United States has rushed headlong into a Totalitarian, if not a Fascist, regime of government-corporate control of the culture and citizens, and we are only seeing the beginnings of it, in part because the Snowden revelations are incomplete, and in part because the government is not forthcoming with just how many and how far its actions go that contradict the Four Freedoms. But with regard to this conclusion, just because our government has the trimmings of a democracy matters not, when the fact is that regardless of who is elected, the political bureaucrats put in office tend to the interests of the ruling regime of corporations and their desire for authoritarian control of all of the information of the culture and the citizens.
This is what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg no doubt at least partially had in mind when she stated that if aggregate limits on individual political contributions are not limited, then “500 people will control American democracy.” This makes U.S. elections a sham and a farce. Worse, it bodes ill for the immediate future, in that Totalitarian regimes are extraordinarily difficult to overthrow without a complete revolution in the mindset (i.e. worldview) of the vast majority of citizens. The obvious mindset or worldview change argued for in this article is that if we want to put the brakes on this bullet-train into headlong Fascism, we must reiterate and organize around these Four Freedoms adumbrated by Roosevelt. They are user-friendly, and nicely encapsulate the primary values for any true democracy. That change of mindset is worth re-committing ourselves to in the year to come. Unlike Obama’s empty campaign rhetoric, it is truly our only “hope” for “change.”