Just imagine what their cries would be if the TVA was privitized.

1. The National Socialist German Workers Party is the actual title of the “Nazi’s.”
2. The official position of the Soviet Union at certain points in the 1930′s was that Nazism was a illegitimate, Socialist halfway-point between Capitalism and the true Marxist Leninist stage of development. This only changed when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941.

It’s a curious thing however that Hitler, Mussolini and Franco took real steps to prevent actual participation by Fascist ideology in setting policy. For instance, Hitler purged the far left elements of the Nazi party such as Otto and Gregor Strasser. Franco’s long control of Spain saw the actual power of the Falangist (sp?) party diminish year by year. Mussolini appointed a chief of secret police who was not even a member of the Fascist Party. There are many such examples. Unlike the Communists, Fascists of all stripes had a cavalier attitude toward doctrinal consistency. They spoke the language of Socialism and organized themselves along those lines. But they were more opportunistic than Marxist Socialists and were far more willing to retain competitive legacy institutions and personnel.

Spengler noted that whereas Marxist Socialist systems destroy all the traditional elements of society only to substitute elements based on mere materialism, “Prussianism” ( Nazism), using a military model, called upon all the power of, ethnic, linguistic, and even religious traditional devotion to powerfully direct society on a deeper level.

It seems to me that Fascism as a political philosophy never matured into a coherent system. Fascist countries never completely adopted Fascism as say, Cambodia adopted and imposed Maoist-Communist principles. And, as Martha Stewart says, “That’s a good thing.”

Maybe he never agreed with it idealogically and simply ran with which ever crowd would give him power.
Power is not a means to an end it is an end.
And it’s a myth that the trains ran on time in Italy.

Fascism and socialism are polar opposites. Anyone who says otherwise is a right winger unhappy with the fact that fascism is a property of the right. Goldberg.
Stop killing words.

Unfeasible? Perhaps. Waste of effort? Definitely not!

But Tom’s point about the failure of Wall Street exposing the bankruptcy of the conglomerate model illustrates that we are simply too frightened to endure the tumult associated with the failure of conglomerates.

I take Sean’s point to be that the GOPers are silly in ranting about “socialism” since, if you want to parse it, every country has policies that can be labeled “socialistic”, but are accept by the populace. It’s an irrelevant argument. There are plenty of substantive arguments to be made against the incestuous relationship of gov’t, corporate American and Wall Street. There are also plenty of arguments to be made against bailouts, loose money, debt-driven growth, etc. But “socialism” ain’t it, unless one takes a purist, libertarian approach. (From a practical viewpoint, undoing the popular socialistic policies we have, SSA, TVA, etc., is wholly unfeasible and a waste of effort.)

By the way, the Mussolini method of ‘making the trains run on time’ was to alter the schedules to reflect when the trains actually operated… there was absolutely no improvement in the efficiency of the rail system itself. You can look it up…