What is Fascism, Really?

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of a private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.”

—Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the Congress, April 29th, 1938.

FDR knew what fascism was, because he faced it not only abroad but at home. In fact, fascism was the same in each instance: those same Wall St. and City of London bankers who put Hitler and Mussolini into power, also desperately tried to stop the immensely popular Roosevelt from becoming President of the United States in 1932; tried to assassinate him after he was elected; and, failing that, then tried to stage a military coup.

Another name for fascism—its very essence, as the fascists themselves proclaim—is corporativism. Mussolini and his co-author Giovanni Gentile (whom Mussolini dubbed “the philosopher of fascism”), described it this way in their 1932 manifesto, “The Doctrine of Fascism”: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporativism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Mussolini’s controller, the British agent and Venetian nobleman Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, oversaw precisely such a public/private “merger”, first as Finance Minister and later as President of the Fascist Confederation of Industrialists. Under his direction, Mussolini pioneered the concept of Public Private Partnerships (PPP’s), through which all of Italy’s national highways were built during his 1922-1945 régime.

Following World War II, the City of London/British Crown think tank, the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), championed the cause of PPPs and other forms of “privatisation” worldwide. The British bank Macquarie was set up in Australia in 1969, as part of that British imperial looting drive. Originally known as Hill Samuel Australia, it was a subsidiary of a lynchpin of British imperialism, London’s Hill Samuel Bank, whose chairman, Sir Kenneth Keith, ran British intelligence after World War II. Along with other major corporations and banks, Macquarie poured funds into MPS subsidiaries in Australia such as the Institute for Public Affairs, the Tasman Institute, and the Centre for Independent Studies, which then designed the entire privatisation crusade in Australia. They guided the rabid privatisation drive in Victoria under Jeff Kennett in the 1990s, and the National Competition Council and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission which have been virtually the sole arbiters of everything which happens in this country, since they were established in 1995. No one is more central to this process than Macquarie Bank. It is the single largest orchestrator of PPPs in the world, and has looted its home base of Australia more than any other place. In classic corporativist style, Macquarie funds the think tanks to design privatisation policies, and uses its assets in State and Federal government to ram them through. Then it hires those same officials, once they retire, (or their relatives) at gigantic salaries, and deploys them as influence-peddlers on their mates who are still in office. The following are only a few current or former members of the Macquarie team, which is so typical of the fascist modus operandi:

Fred Hilmer, architect of National Competition Policy (NCP);
Graeme Samuel, enforcer of NCP, first through the National Competition Council, then as chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission;
Alan Stockdale, awarded hundreds of millions in fees to Macquarie as Treasurer of Victoria under Kennett;
Max Moore-Wilton, Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under John Howard, then Executive Chair of Macquarie’s Sydney Airports Corporation;
Paul McClintock, Secretary to the Cabinet under Howard;
Stan Howard, John Howard’s older brother and chairman of Sydney’s M2 toll road;
Ann Keating, Paul Keating’s younger sister;
Bob Carr, a fanatic privatisation advocate as NSW Premier, now on $500,000 per year from Macquarie as a “consultant”.

Under the Carr régime, Macquarie became the major player in many “public/ private” scams, including Eastern Distributor (concession ends 2048), M2 Motorway (concession ends 2042), M4 Motorway (concession ends 2042), M5 South West Motorway (concession ends 2023), and Westlink M7 (concession ends 2023).

Today, Carr’s long-time subordinate, faction mate and successor as NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, continues the Macquarie privatisation/ PPP crusade. He has recently demanded the privatisation of the NSW state electricity sector for $15 billion, in order to finance yet another corporativist ripoff, Sydney’s proposed M4 East extension. Other PPP gems in Sydney include the infamous Cross City Tunnel, whose own chief executive calls “the most controversial infrastructure project in the world”; the Lane Cove Tunnel, which he calls the world’s “probably second most controversial”; and the M2 (Hills Motorway), all of which were projected, in a recent official study, to go bankrupt unless many billions of additional taxpayer funds are invested. The pattern replicates what happened in Mussolini’s Italy, where most of the highways built by private corporations, but with mostly public funding, later went bankrupt and had to be bought back by the Italian state, looting the public yet again!

Recently, this fascist looting agenda has reached new heights with Kevin Rudd’s appointment of Sir Rod Eddington, the former Ansett boss who bailed out of that airline just before it crashed (and a director of Murdoch’s News Corp, Rio Tinto and JP Morgan), to chair the federal government’s new initiative called “Infrastructure Australia”—a $200 billion fund for PPPs!

Macquarie Bank a Gone Bunny, Iemma Next?

If you want to see Macquarie’s future, take a look at the photo of its role model in Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), Benito Mussolini (at right) shown there along with his mistress in 1945 after Italian partisans were through with them.

Two recent reports show how the vultures are circling. A March 25 George Lekakis column in The Herald Sun summarised the case: “Data collected by Bloomberg News shows that the default risk of Australian banks has never been higher, with Macquarie Bank emerging as one of the riskiest banking players in Asia. ... ‘Macquarie is the closest link in Australia to the problems that are afflicting Bear Stearns and other US investment banks,’ said David McDonald, of Shaw Stockbroking.”

Then, the April 4 Sydney Morning Herald featured a recent study of Macquarie by the New York financial think tank, RiskMetrics, which demonstrates the bank to be one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history, and one destined to blow out in the near term. Wrote the SMH, “The RiskMetrics research, the most thorough yet done on the [Macquarie] model, is likely to send shockwaves through the sector, and give both state and federal governments cause for concern, as governments have mostly privatised public assets through this [Macquarie Group PPP] model”.

“The infrastructure model raises,” RiskMetrics says, “investment-related concerns: overpaying for [infrastructure] assets; widely overestimating toll and other revenue flows; high debt levels, high fees, paying distributions out of capital rather than cash-flow ... booking profits from mere revaluations”, and so forth. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch. But Macquarie is not a “bank” in the normal sense, nor are its British masters counting on its longevity, observed Executive Intelligence Review Economics Chief John Hoefle, who has made a study of Macquarie and similar British imperial fronts. Hoefle likened Macquarie to the infamous U.S.-based Enron “energy company”, whose purpose was to loot and destroy large sections of the U.S. energy grid, before going down in flames itself.

“Any Australian who expected Macquarie to survive the British game is being played for a sucker. Macquarie is the Australian version of Enron, both sent on kamikaze missions by the British to act as battering rams to further their imperial control. Like Enron, Macquarie will not survive the process, but its masters will be able to pick up the pieces at pennies on the dollar. Macquarie is just a tool to push privatisation, using money from the financial bubble to buy control of physical assets, control which will pass to Macquarie’s controllers once Macquarie collapses. It is already dead, whether it realises it or not”, said Hoefle. Reflecting on the savage looting of Australia by both Macquarie, and by the Wall Street/City of London entity Lehman Brothers which has looted Australian councils of tens or probably hundreds of millions of taxpayers money, Hoefle concluded, “My advice to the Australian people is to remember that just because the British invite you to lunch, doesn’t mean you’re going to be a guest. Sometimes, you are the lunch”.