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Old 04-19-2009, 12:14 PM   #122
sterlingice
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Back in Houston!
Quote:
Originally Posted by ISiddiqui View Post
Some, and that would include a number of the tea party folks (as well as plenty of my communist friends) would think that both parties have been getting into bed with big corporations more and more. And of course, it can be said that it starts with just partnerships because of economic necessity (I think many people forget that fascism was very hostile to free market capitalism).

And to those on the farther ends of the spectrum, I can easily see the position of the two major parties these days being closer to fascism than free market capitalism.

Though the other point was that this hardly resembles socialism. In fact many socialists and communists are pissed off that Obama is basically giving money away to big business for barely anything (they already hated Bush for his crony capitalism).

In all honesty: you have a lot of communist friends? I didn't think anyone really self-described themselves that way and it seems rare to see that. I have a couple of friends who are pretty far left socialist (in the European sense) but I don't think they would even describe themselves as communist. Tho, to be fair, we've never seen true communism in place anywhere- the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc were all just dictatorships pretending to be communist, but we're getting far afield.

I agree with most else of what you've said in this and other posts. But I have a major objection to the claim that we are heading more towards fascism: I think a key part of fascism is control of government over industry. We have the exact opposite where industry controls goverment, for the most part. It leads to a different type of dystopia- one that is neither fascist or socialist.

I also think there was a substantial shift between the past administration and this one in that the previous one had more control over industry, primarily using fear, something this administration has been reluctant to do. And that's not to say the previous one wasn't influenced greatly by many industrial figures.

SI
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Last edited by sterlingice : 04-19-2009 at 12:18 PM.
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