Shock Doctrine: Could our current economic crisis echo long-secret brush with fascism?

September 2008:

President George W. Bush proposes a massive bailout for Wall Street, of what was to be $700 billion, but already it turns out — not surprisingly, somehow — that the administration underestimated exactly how much, and who else needs to be bailed out. According to Bloomberg News:

The Bush administration widened the scope of its $700 billion plan to avert a financial meltdown by including assets other than mortgage-related securities. The U.S. Treasury submitted revised guidance to Congress on its plan a day after first submitting it, as lawmakers and lobbyists push their own ideas. Officials now propose buying what they term troubled assets, without specifying the type, according to a document obtained by Bloomberg News and confirmed by a congressional aide.

The change suggests the inclusion of instruments such as car and student loans, credit-card debt and any other troubled asset. That may force an eventual increase in the size of the package as Democrats and Republicans in Congress negotiate the final legislation with the Bush administration, analysts said.

“The costs of the bailout will be significantly higher than originally considered or acknowledged,” said Josh Rosner, an analyst with independent research firm Graham Fisher & Co. in New York. “How, given these changes, can the administration and Federal Reserve believe they are being forthright in their unrevised expectation of future losses?”

In another change today, the Treasury said it would limit its $50 billion plan for insuring money-market funds to those held by investors as of Sept. 19, excluding any subsequent contributions.

November 1934:

Federal investigators uncover an incredible plot involving about two dozen senior businessmen, many of them Wall Street financiers, to topple the government of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship. An alert President Franklin D. Roosevelt shut it down.

A key element of the plot involved a retired general who was to have raised a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers; the general turned whistle-blower when he learned just what the plot really entailed. The plot was heavily funded and well developed and had strong links with fascist forces abroad. A special congressional committee was created to conduct an investigation. The records of this committee were scrubbed and sealed away in the National Archives, where they were not made available until just last year.

The committee kept the names of many of the participants under wraps, and no criminal action was ever brought against them. But a few names have leaked out. Among them was Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush.

Prescott Bush was deep into the business of the shipping firm Hamburg-America Line and had close relations throughout this time with the new government that came to power in Germany a year earlier under Adolph Hitler.

Prescott Bush later went on to become a U.S. senator from Connecticut. His son, George H.W. Bush, emerged from World War II as a hero, later becoming CIA director, vice president and president, and his son George W. Bush went on to become president, also known as ‘Bush 43.’

The plot against America portrayed in this episode of the weekly BBC series “Document” from July 2007  gives fascinating insight into a little known piece of American history in which the nation stood on the very brink of betrayal. The role of one of the most powerful political families in our nation’s history in this whole affair is shocking.

From the BBC, on what it called “the biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy”:

The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America [known as the American Liberty League], (owners of Heinz, Birdseye, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Maxwell House Coffee & George Bush’s grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the Great Depression.

Now here we are yet again, in the midst of a recession or depression depending upon whom you ask, with our tax dollars for generations to come about to be handed over to wealthy Wall Street corporations, with a Bush family member balking at any attempts at restrictions or conditions.

Will Republicans finally stop making jokes about welfare recipients and “government hand-outs”?

Will the government (or the Wall Street financiers) help our friends and neighbors get their repossessed homes back?

It’s often felt to me as if we’ve had a fascist dictatorship in power these last seven-plus years with George W. Bush in the White House, so it makes me wonder if this bailout will throw democracy under the bus and bring Prescott Bush’s deferred dream of corporate-run fascism to fruition.