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Posted

I received this via e-mail from a blog group I am a member of today. I wanted to start a discussion of this rather extreme view (I hope it's extreme) Just because it is an extreme view don't necessarily mean it cannot have some truth in it. so can we discuss this? I have provided the acknowledgments as I could find them.

 

March 15, 2009

 

CommonDreams.org <http://www.commondreams.org/>

 

The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment

 

by Robert Freeman

 

In early 1919, Germany put in place a new government to begin rebuilding the country after its crushing defeat in World War I. But the right-wing forces that had led the country into the War and lost the War conspired even before it was over to destroy the new government, the "Weimar Republic." They succeeded.

 

The U.S. faces a similar "Weimar Moment." The devastating collapse of the economy after eight years of Republican rule has left the leadership, policies, and ideology of the right utterly discredited.

 

But, as was the case with Germany in 1919, Republicans do not intend to allow the new government to succeed. They will do everything they can to undermine it. If they are successful, the U.S. may yet go the way of Weimar Germany.

 

World War I left Germany utterly devastated. The landed aristocrats, industrial magnates, wealthy financiers, weapons makers, and the officer corps of the military that formed the locus of right wing power were completely discredited. Their failure in provoking and prosecuting the War was catastrophic, undeniable, and complete.

 

The economy was destroyed. Prices were at 800% of pre-war levels and rising quickly. Agriculture, pillaged for the War, lay in ruins. Social insurance payments for the War's injured, to widows and orphans, and newly unemployed soldiers were astronomical. And all this was before the cost of rebuilding was even begun.

 

At the same time, Germany faced massive reparations payments to the Allied victors, France and England. But Germany's foreign properties had been confiscated and its colonies turned over to the victors. The combination of these conditions, both domestic and international, made it extraordinarily difficult for the German economy to recover.

 

As a result of the failure of the right, the German people elected a moderately leftist government to lead the nation's rebuilding. It was named the Weimar Republic for the city in which the new post-imperial constitution was written. The new government was led by Friedrich Ebert, head of the German Socialist Party.

 

But the country's new parliamentary system had allowed dozens of parties to run, making it impossible for any one party to win an outright majority. Ebert's party had achieved the highest portion of votes, 38%, in the first post-War elections, held in January 1919.. Ebert would have to govern by coalition.

 

It was at this time that the right wing made its crucial decision.

 

Despite its shocking, naked failure over the prior decade, despite the horrific devastation it had wrought on the German people, despite the discrediting of everything they had purported to stand for, they would fight Ebert, his new government, and its plans for recovery. They would do everything they could to make sure that the new government failed.

 

Their strategy was two-fold: first, stoke the resentment of the population about the calamitous state of its living conditions-no matter that those conditions had been created by the very right-wing oligarchs who now pretended to befriend the little guy. Rage is rage. It is glandular and unseeing. Once catalyzed it is easy to turn on any subject.

 

And stoking resentment was easy to do. Just before the War ended, the military concocted its most sensational lie: the German army hadn't actually been defeated. It had been "stabbed in the back" by communists, traitors, and Jews. It was an easy lie to sell. It entwined an attack on an alien political ideology - liberalism- with the latent, pervasive myth of German racial superiority.

 

The second strategy of the right was to prevent the new government from succeeding. To begin with, success of the left would conspicuously advertise the failure of the right. Moreover, success by the left would legitimize republican government, so hated by the oligarchs of the right. Much better for the people to be ruled by the self-aggrandizing right-wing autocracy that had governed Germany for centuries.

 

So the rightists set out to do everything they could to make it impossible for the leftists to govern. They would use parliamentary maneuver, shifting coalitions, domination of the new mass media, legislative obstruction, staged public relations spectacles, relentless pressure by narrow but powerful interests, judicial intimidation and, eventually, outright murder of their political opponents.

 

Contrition for their abject failure, humility for their destructive hubris, compassion for their crippled country-those had nothing to do with it. All they possessed was a blinding, visceral hatred of the left and a masturbatory lust for the return to power.

 

Eventually, they succeeded. Every setback in recovery - and there would inevitably be many - was met with hysterical demonizing of the left wing government. The lie was repeated relentlessly that the government was run by communists, traitors, and Jews-the same furtive cabal that had purportedly stabbed the country in the back at the end of the War. They steadily chipped away at the efficacy and, thereby, the legitimacy of successive republican governments.

 

By the time of the Great Depression, Adolph Hitler's ironically named National Socialist Party had become the biggest vote getter in the nation. The Nazis had once been derided as the lunatic fringe of the far right. But the "respectable" right-wing power brokers who had started and lost the Great War anointed Hitler Chancellor in January, 1933.

 

He immediately suspended the constitution, abolishing most civil liberties. He outlawed opposition parties, began a massive military build-up and a relentless propaganda campaign, and set Germany and the world onto the path of the greatest destruction it would ever know.

 

America now faces its own "Weimar moment."

 

The failure of right wing policy and leadership over the past eight years, especially in matters economic, is comparable to Germany's right-wing failure in World War I. It is catastrophic, undeniable, and complete.

 

*Consider:*

 

According to the World Economic Forum, forty percent of the entire world's wealth has been destroyed in the recent financial collapse. In the U.S. alone, between housing and the stock market, more than $18 trillion in wealth has already been destroyed.

 

The private mega-banks that anchor the financial systems of the western world are bankrupt. This makes it all but impossible to jump-start the western world's economies which are heavily dependent on bank-system credit to operate.

 

More than 10,000 homes go into foreclosure every day. More than 20,000 people lose their job every day. And the collapse is accelerating, developing its own self-reinforcing dynamic. Job losses breed foreclosures, reducing demand, leading to more job losses and further degradation of the financial system. None of the stopgaps designed to stanch the bleeding have yet worked. There is no bottom in sight.

 

Meanwhile, debt has risen to astronomical levels. Reagan and Bush I quadrupled the national debt in only twelve years. Bush II doubled it again in only eight. It is now ten times higher than it was in 1980 when Reagan was elected. Total public and private debt exceeds 300% of GDP, half again higher than it was in 1929.

 

The government's unfunded liabilities, promises it has made to the American people but for which no payment source can be identified, now exceed $60 trillion, a literally inconceivable sum that can never, will never, be paid. Federal Reserve economist Lawrence Kotlikoff has suggested that the U.S. government is "actuarially bankrupt."

 

The full measure of the nation's plight is revealed in Hillary Clinton's first trip as Secretary of State. It was to China, to beg them to fund Obama's new fiscal deficits. Without loans from China, the U.S. economy cannot be revived. The significance of this cannot be overstated: the U.S. no longer exercises sovereignty over its own economic affairs. That sovereignty now resides in the hands of China, the U.S.'s greatest long-term rival.

 

*Thanks to Republican policies of massive debt and shipping jobs abroad, the U.S. has technically become a colony of China. *It exports raw materials and imports finished goods, together with the capital to make up the difference. Should the Chinese decide not to lend the trillions of dollars the U.S. is begging for, the U.S. economy will implode, plummeting onto itself in a World Trade Center-like collapse that will leave dust clouds circling the planet for decades.

 

Notwithstanding the destruction inflicted on the economy by Republican policies, the most devastating breakdown is in the intellectual foundation on which right wing economic ideology itself is premised.

 

Free market doctrine, the secular religion of right-wing America, is in utter, irretrievable shambles.

 

One of the most lofty tenets on which free markets are premised is their claim for themselves that they are "efficient," that is, that market prices always reflect "fundamental values" of assets. But if that's true, how could the world's largest insurance company, AIG, have lost 99.5% of its market value in only 18 months? How could the world's largest bank, Citibank, have lost 98% of its value over the same period?

 

How could the world's largest brokerage company, Merrill Lynch, have gone bankrupt and need to be bought by Bank of America? How could the world's largest car company, General Motors, have lost 95% of its value and stand on the threshold of extinction? How could the world's largest industrial conglomerate, General Electric, have lost 85% of its value in only 18 months?

 

If the largest companies in the world, those at the very heart of the capitalist system itself, can lose virtually all of their value in only

 

18 months, what is the possible meaning of the phrases "efficient markets" and "fundamental value"?

 

The other core tenets of free market ideology are equally compromised.

 

Major actors are clearly not rational - a breakdown of theological proportions admitted by no less an avatar of the cult than its pope himself, Alan Greenspan. Free markets clearly cannot, will not, regulate themselves. It is precisely their innate, irrepressible propensity for sociopathic greed and predatory fraud that has brought the whole of the world's economy to the precipice of collapse.

 

Free markets clearly do not align risk and reward, allocating capital to its most productive uses, as its promoters advertise. They clearly do not automatically return to equilibrium, but must be bailed out with trillions of dollars of injections from the shrinking coffers of the public to the ever-bulging coffers of a private priesthood of pillage and plunder.

 

And in perhaps the greatest indictment of all, one going back to its primeval roots in Adam Smith's eighteenth century opus, The Wealth of Nations, the unrestrained behavior of self-interested individuals clearly, manifestly, does not "coalesce as if by an Invisible Hand to the greatest good for the greatest number."

 

These are not peripheral premises that have failed. They are not tangential tenets. Efficient markets. Rational actors. Market equilibrium. Risk and reward. Self interest. These are the essential sacraments on which the entire free market system is founded. They are in tatters. And it isn't that any one of them has been discredited by the glaring, merciless force of events. All of them have been. All of them together. And all of them at the same time.

 

Free markets have long been the basis for a legitimate - though rightly debated - economic policy framework. But they have become little more than a robotically-recited cultural catechism, a mindless mantra mumbled to mask the looting of the nation's resources that is the true purpose of Republican economic policy as demonstrated by the staggering upward transfers of wealth that inevitably occur under Republican regimes. A more complete, conspicuous, catastrophic, and irrefutable repudiation of right wing leaders, right wing policies, and right wing ideology could not possibly be contrived.

 

So what is the right wing response?

 

They have adopted the strategy and tactics of the failed right wing plotters in Weimar Germany. First, stoke the resentment of the population about the increasingly dire state of its living conditions-no matter that those conditions were created by the very right-wing oligarchs who now pretend to befriend the little guy. Rage is rage.. It is glandular and unseeing. Once catalyzed it is easy to turn on any subject.

 

Second, prevent the new government from succeeding in any meaningful endeavor. The Republicans have set all their efforts to doing everything they can to make sure the Obama administration fails. Rush Limbaugh's infamous, "I hope he fails" pronouncement is only the beginning of the fomenting of hatred from the right. As Limbaugh said, "Let's be honest.

 

Every Republican in America is hoping for Obama's failure."

 

The same malignant hope oozes unadulterated from all the other Dogpatch Demagogues that rent themselves out to the Republican party to foment resentment against anything liberal: Joe the "Plumber," Rick Santelli, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, and virtually every other wing-nut operative whose intellectual stock in trade has been vaporized by the collision of right-wing policies with objective reality.

 

Equally so for the "respectable" members of the party, the all-but-three Republican members of Congress who refused to sign on to Obama's first stimulus package and continue to grandstand against every effort toward any form of progress. Contrition for their own abject failure, humility for their destructive hubris, compassion for their crippled country-those have nothing to do with it. All they possess is a blinding, visceral hatred of the left and a masturbatory lust for the return to power.

 

And what else can they do? Bereft of ideas, bankrupt in ideology, architects of collapse, obstruction is all they have. If Obama is successful, it will not only advertise the full extent of their failure, it will provide a model of liberal governance that would render Republicans irrelevant for decades, much as FDR's success left them out in the political cold for an entire generation. Liberal failure is a matter of life and death for Republicans.

 

*And it's not at all clear that the liberals won't fail.* No one should underestimate the task at hand. Never before - not even during the Great Depression - has the country inherited such a daunting, intractable set of economic problems: a debt burden so crushing; inequality so vast; a loss of financial sovereignty so constricting; an intellectual edifice so bankrupt; a private economy so uncompetitive; or an opposition so callously self interested in its own recovery and so cavalierly disinterested in the nation's.

 

The economy has been so damaged, successful rescue requires threading a series of policy needles, each of them so complex in their own right that none could be solved by any administration of the past 50 years.

 

This includes rehabilitating and re-regulating the nation's banking system, restructuring health care, reducing national dependence on oil, reviving manufacturing so as to reduce the trade deficit, rebuilding the nation's crumbling infrastructure, dealing with a soaring national debt, trying to resuscitate a collapsing housing market, and all the while maintaining the safety net under 77 million baby boomers entering retirement with a net worth 60% what it was only 18 months ago.

 

Success will require much more than luck, hard work, brilliant policy, or soaring rhetoric. It will require cooperation and contribution from every American. It is those two offerings, cooperation and contribution, that Republicans are intent on withholding, the better to ensure Obama's failure. Simply put, the *Republicans hate Democrats more than they love

 

America.*

 

If they succeed in derailing Obama's efforts, the cost will be incalculable.

 

After World War I, one of the consequences of the liberal government's failure was Adolph Hitler. Hitler had a genius for exploiting the resentment of the German people for their condition. More than 80% of the Nazi party's members were unemployed. It was these legions of idle thugs who made up the ranks of Hitler's brownshirt militia, the SA. The right wing oligarchy that had set out from the beginning to destroy the Weimar Republic recognized the potency of resentment and Hitler's genius at exploiting it. It was they who sponsored Hitler's ascension to Chancellor in 1933.

 

Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s.

 

*The Republican propensity for fascism must not be underestimated.

 

*Witness their phony justifications for the war in Iraq, fanning the flames of nationalistic aggression, just as Hitler did with Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in the 1930s. Consider their symbiotic embrace of corporate interests in the oil, weapons, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, finance, and other industries-the same type of corporate interests that sponsored Hitler's ascent to power. Look at their efforts to dismantle civil liberties with the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act. Or their relentless, pervasive propaganda laundered through their corporate-owned right-wing media machine.

 

*These are the classic hallmarks of fascism.* The strategy is to obstruct recovery, facilitate collapse, and then incite the faux-populism of public resentment to re-install a corporatist oligarchy which has failed, but which will not abide a reduction of its privileges or a diminution of its control. It is a fetid, seditious agenda, awaiting only its own latter day mustachioed messiah for its final fulfillment.

 

World War I was a once-in-a-millennium upset in the architecture of global power. In four years, it shifted the center of that power from Europe to the United States. But failure now by the U.S. will shift that center once again, from the United States to China, out of the western world where it has resided for the past 500 years. The psychic shock to the billion-odd people living in western civilization, with its liberal democracies, capitalist economies, and Enlightenment ideals, will be incalculable, irretrievable.

 

This shift may be inevitable and only a matter of time. It is quite possible that the damage inflicted on the western world's economy by rapacious Republicans is already beyond repair. But it will be tragedy beyond measure if such a shift is consummated by the very wrecking crew that took us down the road to ruin, all the while so unctuously proclaiming "patriotism" as its crowning ideal. They are not patriots and their goal is not the revival of American power. It is the revival of their own power, even at the expense of America's. They represent a very dangerous threat to the nation's future.

 

Robert Freeman writes on history, economics and education. He can be reached at [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>.

Posted

Moon; When I read something like this, I like to review the author. He apparently is a contributor to 'Common Dreams' and not much else. Couldn't find any other articles.

 

The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment | CommonDreams.org

 

This is the original with 'comments' which he (Freeman) discusses his article. To shorten my comments, think you will find he and others are basically just Bush/Conservative haters and trying to link pre-Hitler Germany to actions of Conservatives, possibly back to Teddy Roosevelt. IMO, the reality is/was GWB was no conservative and actions by the current administration may indeed be maintaining this 'so called crisis', creating an environment of need of Government with an agenda I feel is in motion, that is not sure how far or where this agenda can go...

Posted

While I know this is an extreme view and I for one never take the extreme views with out a grain of salt i feel like we (or me) as a moderate can always learn something from the crazies of either extreme. right now the extreme right is saying some pretty crazy things. If nothing else it allows the extreme left to gather up support by using the Right views as ammunition. I would hope we can learn from these views to see first "are there any real world connection to these views?" I think there are, if nothing else some of what the right is says can indeed be misconstrued very easily to correspond to this idea of the down fall of post WW1 Germany. I know the right often uses the fear of the extreme left and the connection with socialism and communism and perceived anti capitalism against the left. I think if nothing else seeing how both extremes are "extreme" is a good thing but to do that I think we need to discuss why these views are extreme and not indicative of the Conservatives or liberals as real human beings. Far too much time is given over to showing how different they are and to trying to compartmentalize them away from each other. I think very few people really think the way the extreme tries to make it seem. both sides use this fear of the extremes to try and influence those of us who are more a part of the center. How can we combat this? Can we easily refute this? do we have to admit some correlation? should we bring this type of thing out into the open and shine some healthy sunlight on it? Lots of questions, lots of incentive to know the answers as well. I have even heard some opinions that both sides are working together to bring about a less than free government by pitting each side against the other.

Posted

I think Freeman’s reference to “the Republican propensity for fascism”, while overly broad, is noteworthy, and, when applied to a small collection of members of the Republican party and a much greater number of US citizens, accurate.

 

The history and political theory related to the term “fascism” is complicated and controversial, but one can do worse than defining it as a worldview favoring the concentration of authority in a single executive (AKA a dictator) and a strong, aggressive military, and believing that a nation may justly dominate other by virtue of having a stronger military, rather than being bound by treaties and international law. This worldview leads to the conclusion that countries with weak militaries will be conquered or dominated by those with strong militaries.

 

This worldview can be held both by leaders, and by ordinary citizens, the role of the leaders to shift power from other jurisdictions and branches of government to the national executive (in the US, the President of the US), the role of the ordinary citizens to encourage and support the leaders.

 

I believe that the key policy makers within the G. W. Bush administration have this facist worldview, and that many citizens voted for Bush and other Republican candidates because they shared it. Strong indicators of having a fascist wordview among US leaders and citizens, I think, is the belief that the President should be able to take actions, such as imprisoning people indefinitely without charges, that would be illegal for ordinary people, and the belief that policies other than military domination will result in terrible attacks on, and possibly the conquest of the US. These indicators are, I think, plainly given in the form of statements by many leaders and their supporters, most of them Republicans. Various indirect polls, I believe, show a strong correlation between that having a fascist worldview and self-identifying as a Republican. While this is not to say that all Republicans have a fascist worldview, or that no Democrats or supporters of other political parties do not, I believe the correlation is strong enough that we can accurately conclude that the Republican party stands for the fascist worldview, as I’ve defined it.

 

This and related observations aside, I don’t consider the major assertion in Freeman’s essay - that the US is on the verge of catastrophic hyper-inflation, irreparable economic failure and political takeover by a fascist dictatorship – to be accurate.

 

There are hardly any significant parallels between the Wiemar republic and the current US republic. The US government was not recently formed by the governments of countries who had defeated it in a war. It has not been forced to surrender valuable resources, nor pay large war reparations. The US inflation rate, in terms of CPI, for the past 10 years has averaged about 2.5% per year, currently (for February 2009) is 0.24%, compared with 1923 Germany’s 1923 average rate of about 52,500,000,000% per year, which peaked at about 100% per 2 days, a fairly inconceivable an nameless rate of about 870,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (about [math]10^{57}[/math]) % per year.

 

The check and balances of the US government, I believe, remain strong, and have been strong even under the 2001-2009 Bush Presidency, with the three branches participating in policy making, not being replaced by a single dictator, as occurred by 1933 in Germany. Two large political parties, the Republican and Democratic, have nearly equal power, while many small parties have slight power, compared to the complete takeover by the Nazi party in Germany.

 

In short, the US system of government appears to me to be working, and Freeman’s concerns, while thought provoking, are very unrealistic.

 

This notwithstanding, IMHO, the greatest threat to the US is a takeover of its government by its President, something no past or current President has desired (despite what some past Bush/Cheney and present Obama opponents claim). Were such a person and a cabal of loyal followers to gain the Presidency, his or her capability to achieve such a takeover, I think, would be aided most by a large, loyal military. To my profound dismay, I believe the current US military is such a military. Were a President determined to replace the Republic with a dictatorship, I believe he or she could do so with the present US military.

 

Therefore, I believe the most important goal for the long-term stability of the US is a dramatic reduction in size of its military, and reorganizing of the real chain of command of the state national guards under the state governors, except when the militia is called forth by the US Congress, as described by the US Constitution.

 

Sources: Current Inflation, Weimar Republic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Posted

A return to a true understanding of our Constitution, a return to it's tenets, a return of power to the states and communities and reduction in power held by the Executive, Judicial, and Congressional branches would be a good start. It is my understanding the a truly Free Market isn't what we have had, both sides have manipulated it to their own, and not the common good, ends and it needs to be stopped.

 

Most of this article seem to state 'facts' not in evidence, state events that actually have not happened, and make up numbers I have not seen in any of the reports it mentions. It is a shame that ALL sides seem to be more intent on placing blame than taking it. We are all at fault, now what are we going to do from here? I hope that the spirit I believe is America will prevail and this challenge will, as challenges so often do, bring out the best in the people of this country. I fear that the politicians and media will win and I will wake up one day with not enough freedom left to breath. Either way, we live in interesting times.

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

It is highly illogical and disingenuous to compare US to Weimar. I honestly cannot even explain why because they're obviously two entirely different situations, and I am lost for words when trying to explain the obvious.

 

I have difficulty reading material that gets facts and logic way wrong so I had to stop once I noticed the claim that the US economy has collapsed. Its size has reduced by a small but not entirely insignificant degree. Not only is this not collapse, but it's not even remotely close to collapse.

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