Fri, 21 Jan 2005
Kennedy: Fascist America
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wants to run for Attorney General of New York State.
He might announce his candidacy within the next two weeks.
He's the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the former Attorney General under
his brother, John F. Kennedy.
In 2001, President Bush named the Justice Department building after RFK.
The young Kennedy attended the ceremony.
We asked him what he thought of President Bush naming the building
after his dad.
He said he wouldn't comment on the record.
But he did call President Bush "the most corrupt and immoral
President that we have had in American history."
Not that he was enamored with Senator John Kerry.
Early in the campaign, Kennedy endorsed Senator John Kerry for
President, but last month he expressed disappointment in Kerry's
campaign and in the Democratic Party.
"The Republicans are 95 percent corrupt and the Democrats are 75
percent corrupt," Kennedy said. "They are accepting money from the
same corporations. And of course, that is going to corrupt you."
He has spent the last 18 years as a sort of private attorney general
-- suing polluters to clean up the Hudson River.
Kennedy says that in the late 1960s, the Hudson River was "a national joke."
"It was dead water for 20-mile stretches north of New York City and
south of Albany. It caught fire. It changed colors," he said. "Today,
it is the richest water body in the North Atlantic. It produces more
pounds of fish per acre and more biomass per gallon than any other
waterway in the Atlantic north of the equator. It is the last major
river system left in the North Atlantic, on both sides, that still
has strong spawning stocks of all of its historical species of
migratory fish."
He is seeking to close down the Indian Point nuclear power plant 22
miles north of New York City.
"After Chernobyl, 1,000 miles around the plant were uninhabitable.
One hundred miles around the plant are permanently uninhabitable," he
said. "One hundred miles around Indian Point would be all of New York
City. So, imagine a world without New York City. Well, the terrorists
already have. According to the 9/11 Commission, Mohammed Atta cased
Indian Point before deciding to bomb the World Trade Center. But he
believed, erroneously as it turned out, that the plant must be so
heavily guarded, that it would be impossible to crash an airliner
into it."
Kennedy charges that his appearance on MSNBC's Charles Grodin show in
November 1996 got Grodin fired.
Kennedy was invited on the show to talk about his book and group by
the same name -- Riverkeepers.
On the show, Kennedy ripped into GE, an owner of the network, for
polluting the Hudson with PCBs.
On the show, Kennedy claimed that "every woman between Oswego and
Albany has elevated levels of PCBs in her milk because of GE."
Grodin was soon thereafter fired.
Kennedy wrote a book last year that he hoped would change the
direction of the country.
It didn't.
But it's a great book, nonetheless.
It's called Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his
Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
(HarperCollins, 2004).
For the past couple of years, he's been giving 40 or so speeches a
year, mostly in the red zone, mostly to conservative groups.
He speaks about the corporate attack on the country.
"There is no difference between the reaction I get from Republicans
and Democrats, because Americans share the same values," Kennedy told
us. "If you talk about these issues in terms of our national values,
everybody understands it."
In the book, Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and
that the Bush White House has learned key lessons from the Nazis.
"While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is
the control of government by business," he writes. "My American
Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as ‘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.' Sound familiar?"
He quotes Hitler's propaganda chief Herman Goerring: "It is always
simply a matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy,
or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Kennedy then adds: "The White House has clearly grasped the lesson."
Kennedy also quotes Benito Mussolini's insight that "fascism should
more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of
state and corporate power."
"The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power,"
Kennedy told us. "There is vogue in the White House to talk about the
threat of big government. But since the beginning of our national
history, our most visionary political leaders have warned the
American public against the domination of government by corporate
power. That warning is missing in the national debate right now.
Because so much corporate money is going into politics, the
Democratic Party itself has dropped the ball. They just quash
discussion about the corrosive impact of excessive corporate power on
American democracy."
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate
Crime Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com. Robert
Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational
Monitor, http://www.multinationalmonitor.org. They are co-authors of
On the Rampage: Corporate Predators and the Destruction of Democracy
(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press;
http://www.commoncouragepress.com).
(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
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