Take Your Pick: Fascism, Socialism, Nationalization

It is the essence of irony.

A combination of eight years of the so-called "compassionate conservatism" of a failed George W. Bush, the successful demands of leftist congressional Democrats like Rep. Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd for housing for the poor at any cost, the epidemic greed of Wall Street financiers and their   banking buddies -- this lethal amalgam has produced -- not just major damage to what passes for American free market capitalism -- but worse, the advent of an unprecedented form of official United States government corporatism/fascism/socialism.

The federal government’s plans to spend trillions propping up banks large and small, along with recent bailouts, as well as guarantees, to support the auto industry, business loans, money markets and bank lending, represents the most sweeping government intrusion into the nation’s business and financial markets since the Great Depression (1928-1942) -- and perhaps ever in history.

A Government Taking

Indeed, it appears that the federal government, (possibly to be under the control of the far left Barack Obama and his hard-core liberal cohorts), soon will own and direct an untold number of U.S. banks, influencing banking decisions on investments, lending, mortgages, even dividends (if any) to stockholders.

Bush officials say they plan to spend $350 billion taking over banks. I say "taking" because when the government legislates its own bank ownership, it surely can't be called "buying."

A few days ago I wrote: "Bank bailouts may or may not be necessary to avoid a major economic recession, but government owning private businesses and banks smacks of fascism...the same kind of economic fascism once promoted by Mussolini, Hitler and Juan Peron, among other economic crackpots. America, welcome to 'backdoor fascism.'"

Nationalization By Any Name

In Europe's old socialist welfare states, government bank ownerships are routinely called "nationalization" programs. That's what they are -- and it took Margaret Thatcher and years of hard won battles to free the United Kingdom from this socialist morass -- to which the U.K. is now returning.

After World War II, several European countries, including the U.K., nationalized basic industries like coal, steel and even autos, which remained in government hands until the 1980s, when most sensible Western economies ended the state’s role in the economy. Prosperity generally followed.

Look Out, Folks

The sometime conservative columnist David Brooks warns in the title to his New York Times column today: "Big Government Ahead".

That, dear reader, is putting the truth far too mildly. Folks, you ain't seen nothing yet. (And I'm not even talking about the billions in new taxes coming at us).

The government actions and the $700 billion bail out, adopted by a panicked U.S. Congress frightened by a major stock market crash, are only the beginning.

And the wide latitude to act, and the huge powers now given to the federal government, will undoubtedly be used to the hilt by an Obama administration -- look for massive expansion of government regulation and state ownership pushed by increased leftist Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress.

Bureaucrats on Steroids

Think how you may have been humiliated, herded and hounded at the nation's airports by the brainless bureaucratic minions of the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) of the Homeland Security Department. (At least they think they are fighting "terrorism.")

Very soon, with Obama in the White House and leftist Democrats controlling Congress, you'll have TSA-type bureaucrats crawling all over you and your life -- dictating mortgages, steering bank lending, imposing small business rules, controlling investing, telling you who you can hire and fire, forcing currency controls, redistributing your hard earned income to Obama's hand picked welfare recipients.

A hardly "conservative" Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, presided over one of the most active regulatory periods of the last half-century, working with the Democrats who controlled Congress in the early 1970s. His sad legacy includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and, for a time, wage and price controls that failed miserably and screwed up the economy.

Out Nixoning Nixon

When it comes to regulation, Obama will certainly out-Nixon Nixon. Look for all these meddling agencies to go crazy on steroids under a President Obama.

"We now have a collective anger, disgust, over our whole financial system and it’s obvious we’re going to get a regulatory backlash," says Robert E. Litan, an economist at the Brookings Institution who has studied financial and regulatory issues for decades, "and we know it’s going to come in a big way in 2009."

Part of the looming leftist clamp down on liberty will be aimed squarely at your current freedoms to act financially offshore -- curbs on investing, banking, currency trading offshore. I've repeatedly warned about Obama's economically insane plans to control offshore activity of all kind.

You may not have much more time to go offshore -- now definitely is the time to act -- before the exit gates are closed by a leftist/fascist government such as no Americans have ever suffered before.

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