“Fascism is a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.” -- Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile

Most of us Americans have our own methods of evaluating political candidates and their party platforms during our seemingly perpetual campaign seasons that have been increasingly corrupted by the wealthy elites who purchase the allegiance of their chosen candidates. Sooner or later we have to start deciding which candidates are the least influenced by money and the least bad for the future of our increasingly poisoned planet and toxified, malnourished children.
However the candidates and their corporate and billionaire paymasters win their seats, they are the ones who will shamelessly be making life or death decisions for us lowly 99 Percenters over the next two, four, or six years. These elites, beholden only to the wealthy campaign contributors/bribers, will be deciding the fate of the earth, the fate of our unaware and innocent progeny, and the fate of every other living thing they seem to have little or no concern about, except as to how they can be exploited for the benefit of the few.

The Latest Political Telephone
Survey

Every few weeks, the corporate-controlled media does a telephone survey polling a thousand random phone owners (that is, landline phones, with cell phone owners excluded, a serious flaw that makes the results statistically worthless). The “results” are reported and, over the past election cycle, usually concluded that “most Americans view the country as moving in the wrong direction”—implying that the political party currently in power is responsible for the lack of public confidence and therefore deserving of being thrown out of office.
The pollsters never seem to do surveys asking people if American capitalism and our nation’s exploitive and extractive economy is working for them. If there were such surveys, I suspect that the ruling elites, the Wall Street profiteers, the captains of industry, the filthy rich types who have bodyguards and chauffeurs and live in gated communities would get much more than a double-digit approval rating. Corporate ratings, despite the billions of dollars spent “green-washing” their images on TV, would be similar to the 9 percent approval rating of Congress or the (supposedly disastrous) 46 percent job approval rating for President Obama. Most of us 99 Percenters would testify, if we were ever asked, that it is the unelected One Percenter misleaders and their corporations that are leading America in the wrong direction, laughing all the way to the bank.
I dare say that every American who has seen their beloved soldiers killed, maimed, psychologically and spiritually disabled, or otherwise wasted in the illegal wars for oil in Afghanistan and Iraq would denounce, if asked, the corporate war profiteers on Wall Street and War Street who own most of the major party politicians and all of the lobbyists who keep the gravy train going full steam ahead. Isn’t it obvious that it is those unelected One Percenters and their political puppets who need to be resisted, shunned, and thrown out of power?
I doubt that the approval numbers for unelected ruling elites like the Koch Brothers could possibly get into the double digits—unless those who were being polled were seriously under-informed, misinformed, unaware, distracted, or addicted to something. What would the polling response concerning corporate predators be for those who are at risk of bankruptcy because of 1) astronomical medical “care” costs, 2) predatory student loans, 3) massive credit card debt, or 4) predatory mortgage foreclosures? How would each and every impoverished person respond if they understood that they have been made to fail by America’s pampered, wealth-extracting financial institutions and corporations?

The 14 Characteristics of Fascism:
How Many of Them Do Your
Political Party or Candidate
or Nation) Exhibit?

The voting strategy I use requires a little bit of effort, some luck, and some knowledge of history, especially the history of the politics of extremist, right-wing, corporate-controlled conservatism—otherwise known as fascism. (See the original definition of fascism above and the historical conclusions that could be drawn from a study of the history of fascism, since Mussolini invented it in Italy in the 1920s, in Prof. Lawrence Britt’s important article “Fascism Anyone?” originally published in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2. It can be accessed online at http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=britt_23_2.)

Here is a list of the 14 Characteristics of Fascism, as developed by Lawrence Britt, PhD:

• Powerful Nationalism/Patriotism

• Human Rights Violations

• Unification Around Scapegoats

• Militarism

• Sexism

• Press Censorship/Control
• Strong National Security State

• “Merger” of Church and State

• Corporatism

• Suppression of Trade Unions

• Anti-Intellectualism

• Law and Order Obsession

• Corrupt Crony Capitalism

14) Fraudulent Elections

Most of these characteristics should sound familiar to those who know their American history. Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” reveals many of them. Most of those realities, if not all, are increasingly characteristic of many of the Republican Party’s most conservative politicians that I have known since Nixon and Reagan, and also characterize many of the most conservative governors, U.S. congresspersons, state governors, and state legislators who are in the news.
But many of national Democratic Party politicians have been tainted by some of the 14 fascist traits (with the possible exceptions of human rights violations, sexism, church-state relations, labor union suppression, and anti-intellectualism). So it could fairly be said that the Democratic Party only meets 9 of the above 14 characteristics of fascism, whereas the GOP arguably meets 14 out of 14. And that should give all voters pause.

The Green Party of Minnesota is the Most Anti-Fascist Political Party in America

A point that needs to be made here is that the Green Party of Minnesota doesn’t qualify for any of the characteristics of fascism. Furthermore, the 10 key “green” values listed further below are powerfully anti-fascist—and radically pro-democracy.
Figuring out how fascist-leaning your candidates are is important and should make voting decisions somewhat easier, considering that most candidates are tainted to some degree. So voters may still find themselves voting for the least bad candidate.
When it comes to the imperialist, pro-corporate, pro-globalization, global warming denying, pro-war agendas of the corporate sponsors of both parties, it can be said that America may be actually governed by a single War Party with two wings. One wing is essentially moderate, centrist/right-wing (the Democratic Party) and the other is more extremist, rabid, radical and far right (the Republican Party).
Figuring out how fascist the candidates are can be difficult, only partly because of the confusing existence of the GOP’s Libertarian, Tea Party, Christian Fundamentalist, and quasi-KKK wings, and the nearly non-existent left-leaning, democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Each wing and each candidate must be individually evaluated.
And here is where voters need to recognize the efforts in Minnesota to obtain major party status for the Green Party, many of whose members consist of disgruntled progressives and Paul Wellstone devotees who have left (or are tempted to leave) the DFL over the national Democratic Party’s neo-liberal, globalist, imperialist, pro-war

The 10 Key Green Party Values:
How Many of Them Does Your
Political Party, Candidate of
Nation Embrace?

The Green Party of America has put together a list of ten key values that would have made Paul Wellstone proud (with his green bus and green campaign posters). Wellstone would have been a perfect Green Party candidate. But of course he was killed for his green, anti-war, anti-fascist values (see: http://www.wellstonetheykilledhim.com/ for the evidence). It should make every true believer in democracy aspire to the Green Party vision. Below is a summary of that list. A useful expansion of the list can be found at: http://www.gp.org/tenkey.php.

1. Grassroots Democracy

2. Social Justice and Equal Opportunity

3. Ecological Wisdom
.
4. Non-Violence

5. Decentralization

6. Community Based Economics

7. Feminism and Gender Equity

8. Respect for Diversity
.
9. Personal and Global Responsibility

10. Future Focus and Sustainability
True patriots need to vote for the candidate (and the party) with the fewest fascist traits, the most Green Party values and the fewest financial ties to the corrupting corporations that have anti-democracy, pro-war or wealth-extracting agendas.

The Democracy-killing “Citizens
United” Ruling

Believers in democracy need to understand the democracy-threatening realities of the infamous “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission” ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court made in 2010. Citizens United was a pro-corporate, anti-democracy ruling that has never been denounced by any Republican loyalist (and by only a few Democrats), but the efforts to reverse the ruling via Move to Amend (https://movetoamend.org/) is a major party plank of the Minnesota Green Party platform. See all the details of that platform at http://mngreens.nationbuilder.com/green_party_of_minnesota_platform.
The absurd notion that conscienceless, non-human, paper corporations deserve the same human rights as human persons was pushed through as a legal principle by the five neo-conservative, corporate lapdogs on the bench, making lawful obscene, anonymous campaign contributions to political parties, their candidates, and assorted nefarious groups that pay for million-dollar attack ads on TV and radio. This corporate-friendly, democracy-hostile misapplication of the First Amendment guarantees that nobody will be able to find out who benefits and exactly who are the people or corporations that are bribing and corrupting our lawmakers at both federal and state government levels.
A truly democratic, anti-fascist, green America would find itself more secure, financially healthier, and again respected by and relevant to the rest of the world rather than feared, despised, and hated for its cruel, imperialist agendas that only benefit the corporations and the wealthy elite.
The main problem, of course, is that America’s two major political parties, especially the Republican Party, seem to have been bought and paid for by the unelected elites and corporate lobbyists who have the big money to finance the perpetual election and re-election campaigns of both major parties.

The Biggest Protofascist Business
Going: The Pentagon and the
 Lethal Weapons Industries

The worst of these politicians are firmly in the back pockets of the biggest business going and the mother of all deficit-spenders, the U.S. Pentagon and its huge number of weapons manufacturers. (A close second to the weapons industries—a.k.a. “merchants of death”—in money, lobbying power, and the production of serious planetary pollution is the pharmaceutical industry, which also manufactures and markets addictive and earth-poisoning products.)
It needs to be pointed out here that the Pentagon budget approaches a trillion dollars a year, when one adds in the periodic supplemental war budget appropriations, the interest payments on the DOD-caused debt (paid to wealthy investors), and the enormous and unending costs of treating the millions of permanent service-connected, combat-induced disabilities at the VA. Add to that the $4 trillion debt incurred just by Ronald Reagan’s administration, a debt that has never been paid off, as it borrowed (at high interest rates) and spent so lavishly on building America’s nuclear arsenal and Cold War defense operations.
And then there was the $2.3 trillion that disappeared from Pentagon coffers, revealed in a Pentagon briefing by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld the day before 9/11/01, so that nothing came of it. See the evidence at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Bn_CC_mrg.
But that’s another story, one that reveals that those auditing officials who were investigating that scandalous financial “cooking of the Pentagon books” were in the very section of the Pentagon that was hit by the (non-airliner, probably a cruise missile) flying object the next day. See the evidence at http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/trillions.html and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU.
When it comes to understanding why remedying America’s financial, political, and ethical problems is not happening (mainly because of the racist, Obama-hating, gridlock masters in the House), we must realize that the vast majority of our major party politicians have been turned into obedient lapdogs of the bloated, too-big-to-fail (and too-big-to-criticize), 800-pound Pentagon gorilla that treats with disdain every progressive, critical-thinking, peace-promoting citizen. It must be said that if the U.S. is ever going to be able to balance its budget, the warmongering politicians and pro-war political parties favored by the military-industrial complex need to be challenged—and then voted out of office.
Many concerned observers of the current political scene in America have seen alarming trends in the noisy right-wing agitators who have usurped power in the once-respectable Republican Party that has lately been gradually purging its moderates. Book banning and book burnings and the anti-intellectualism that goes along with that mentality should remind us of what happened in Germany after World War I, just as right-wing police state totalitarian rule began in earnest during the 12-year existence of the Third Reich.
It could happen here. The main thing that Friendly American Fascism lacks now is a screeching dictator who has the support of the wealthy, the corporations, the Pentagon, and the national security apparatus. American totalitarianism, if the current worrisome trends continue to develop, may be coming about by a slow, rolling, bloodless coup almost invisibly brought on by a whole bunch of smiley-faced, good-looking politicians whose names might be Rick or Scott, whose religion is radical right-wing Christianity, and whose spokespersons may be sexy-looking, humorless blonde women. Friendly American Fascists won’t look anything like the Nazis we have learned to loathe.  
Those of us who are barely, hopelessly clinging to an uncertain middle-class or working-class existence are being hypnotized by a diverse group of political and corporate misleaders all over the mainstream media. But those of us in the white middle class haven’t really experienced the current American brand of racism, militarism, and economic oppression that the desperate, impoverished, homeless, jobless, hungry, non-white, native, and discriminated-against have been suffering for generations.

Dr Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic, non-drug mental health care for the last decade of his career. He is involved in peace, nonviolence and justice issues and therefore writes about mental ill health, fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, imperialism, totalitarianism, economic oppression, anti-environmentalism andzother violent, unsustainable, anti-democratic movements.