Bloomberg: I Can't Win White House

Bloomberg: I Can't Win White House



NEW YORK (AP) -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg said - again- that he's not running for president, adding in a television interview that he wouldn't win anyway.

"Nobody's going to elect me president of the United States," he told Dan Rather for a program that will air Tuesday on cable's HDNet channel. "What I'd like to do is to be able to influence the dialogue. I'm a citizen."

The billionaire left the Republican Party recently to become an independent, throwing into overdrive the speculation that he will make a run for the White House.

Bloomberg likes to throw water on the rumors while simultaneously keeping them alive behind the scenes. His aides are not bashful about promoting the idea that he could jump into the race next year as a self-financed independent candidate.

Bloomberg told Rather he has no interest in higher office and owes the next two and a half years of his final term to the people of New York.

"My job is to represent them and put that ahead of any of my own personal aspirations," he said.

But I think he COULD win, especially if the GOP candidate sucks bad enough. I don't think he would be a good president at all, but the irony of a Jew heading up the first brazenly, openly fascist* ticket in the US history of elections is a bit, well, dare I say, RICH.

*I mean fascist in the sense of the marriage of corporate interests and the state, not fascist in the sense of black or brown shirts and jackboots, though one thing can sometimes lead to another....

Here, I'll school you rather than excoriate you:

FASCISM a political system in which all power of government is vested in a person or group with no other power to balance and limit the activities of the government. Fascist governments are often closely associated with large corporations and sometimes with extreme nationalism and racist activities. Modern fascism is often called "CORPORATISM."

http://www.naiadonline.ca/book/01Glossary.htm

Some scholars view fascism in narrow terms, and some even insist that the ideology was limited to Italy under Mussolini. When the term is capitalized as Fascism, it refers to the Italian movement. But other writers define fascism more broadly to include many movements, from Italian Fascism to contemporary neo-Nazi movements in the United States. This article relies on a very broad definition of fascism, and includes most movements that aim for total social renewal based on the national community while also pushing for a rejection of liberal democratic institutions.

How Mussolini managed it:

Between 1925 and 1931, the Fascists consolidated power through a series of new laws that provided a legal basis for Italy’s official transformation into a single-party state. The government abolished independent political parties and trade unions and took direct control of regional and local governments. The Fascists sharply curbed freedom of the press and assumed sweeping powers to silence political opposition. The government created a special court and police force to suppress so-called anti-Fascism. In principle Mussolini headed the Fascist Party and as head of state led the government in consultation with the Fascist Grand Council. In reality, however, he increasingly became an autocrat answerable to no one. Mussolini was able to retain power because of his success in presenting himself as an inspired Duce (Leader) sent by providence to make Italy great once more.

The Fascist government soon created mass organizations to regiment the nation’s youth as well as adult leisure time. The Fascists also established a corporatist economic system, in which the government, business, and labor unions collectively formulated national economic policies. The system was intended to harmonize the interests of workers, managers, and the state. In practice, however, Fascist corporatism retarded technological progress and destroyed workers’ rights. Mussolini also pulled off a major diplomatic success when he signed the Lateran Treaty with the Vatican in 1929, which settled a long-simmering dispute over the Catholic Church’s role in Italian politics. This marked the first time in Italian history that the Catholic Church and the government agreed over their respective roles. Between 1932 and 1934 millions of Italians attended the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome, staged by the government to mark Fascism’s first ten years in power. By this point the regime could plausibly boast that it had brought the country together through the Risorgimento (Italian unification process) and had turned Italy into a nation that enjoyed admiration and respect abroad.
http://encarta.msn.com/text_761568245___0/Fascism.html


Characteristics of Fascist Philosophy
Fascism, especially in its early stages, is obliged to be antitheoretical and frankly opportunistic in order to appeal to many diverse groups. Nevertheless, a few key concepts are basic to it. First and most important is the glorification of the state and the total subordination of the individual to it. The state is defined as an organic whole into which individuals must be absorbed for their own and the state's benefit. This "total state" is absolute in its methods and unlimited by law in its control and direction of its citizens.
A second ruling concept of fascism is embodied in the theory of social Darwinism. The doctrine of survival of the fittest and the necessity of struggle for life is applied by fascists to the life of a nation-state. Peaceful, complacent nations are seen as doomed to fall before more dynamic ones, making struggle and aggressive militarism a leading characteristic of the fascist state. Imperialism is the logical outcome of this dogma.
Another element of fascism is its elitism. Salvation from rule by the mob and the destruction of the existing social order can be effected only by an authoritarian leader who embodies the highest ideals of the nation. This concept of the leader as hero or superman, borrowed in part from the romanticism of Friedrich Nietzsche , Thomas Carlyle , and Richard Wagner , is closely linked with fascism's rejection of reason and intelligence and its emphasis on vision, creativeness, and "the will."

The Fascist State
Fascism has found adherents in all countries. Its essentially vague and emotional nature facilitates the development of unique national varieties, whose leaders often deny indignantly that they are fascists at all. In its dictatorial methods and in its use of brutal intimidation of the opposition by the militia and the secret police, fascism does not greatly distinguish itself from other despotic and totalitarian regimes. There are particular similarities with the Communist regime in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. However, unlike Communism, fascism abhors the idea of a classless society and sees desirable order only in a state in which each class has its distinct place and function. Representation by classes (i.e., capital, labor, farmers, and professionals) is substituted for representation by parties, and the corporative state is a part of fascist dogma.
Although Mussolini's and Hitler's governments tended to interfere considerably in economic life and to regulate its process, there can be no doubt that despite all restrictions imposed on them, the capitalist and landowning classes were protected by the fascist system, and many favored it as an obstacle to socialization. On the other hand, the state adopted a paternalistic attitude toward labor, improving its conditions in some respects, reducing unemployment through large-scale public works and armament programs, and controlling its leisure time through organized activities. .....Corporative state
The economic system inaugurated by the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy. It was adapted in modified form under other European dictatorships, among them Adolf Hitler's National Socialist regime in Germany and the Spanish regime of Francisco Franco. Although the Italian system was based upon unlimited government control of economic life, it still preserved the framework of capitalism. Legislation of 1926 and later years set up guilds, or associations, of employees and employers to administer various sectors of the national economy. These were represented in the national council of corporations. The corporations were generally weighted by the state in favor of the wealthy classes, and they served to combat socialism and syndicalism by absorbing the trade union movement. The Italian corporative state aimed in general at reduced consumption in the interest of militarization.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Fascism_def_char_hx.html

As a political science, the philosophical pretext to the literal fascism of the historical Italian type believes the state's nature is superior to that of the sum of the individual's comprising it, and that they exist for the state rather than the state existing to serve them. The resources individuals provide from participating in the community are conceived as a productive duty of individual progress serving an entity greater than the sum of its parts. Therefore all individual's business is the state's business, the state's existence is the sole duty of the individual. In its Corporativist model of totalitarian but private management the various functions of the state were trades conceived as individualized entities making that state, and that it is in the state's interest to oversee them for that reason, but not direct them or make them public by the rationale that such functioning in government hands undermines the development of what the state is. Private activity is in a sense contracted to the state so that the state may suspend the infrastructure of any entity in accord to their usefulness and direction, or health to the state.

The social composition of Fascist movements have historically been small capitalists, low-level bureaucrats and the middle classes. Fascism also met with great success in rural areas, especially among farmers, peasants, and in the city, the lumpenproletariat. A key feature of fascism is that it uses it's mass movement to attack the organizations of the working class - parties of the left and trades unions.

Unlike the pre–World War II period, when many groups openly and proudly proclaimed themselves fascist, in the post–World War II period the term has taken on an extremely pejorative meaning, largely in reaction to the crimes against humanity undertaken by the Nazis. Today, very few groups proclaim themselves as fascist, and the term almost universally is used for groups for whom the speaker has little regard, often with minimal understanding of what the term actually means. The term "fascist" or "Nazi" is often ascribed to individuals or groups who are perceived to behave in an authoritarian manner; by silencing opposition, judging personal behavior, or otherwise attempting to concentrate power. More particularly, "Fascist" is sometimes used by people of the Left to characterize some group or persons of the far-right or neo-far-right, or the far left activists as a description of any political or cultural influences perceived as "non-progressive," or merely not sufficiently progressive. This usage receded much following the 1970s, but has enjoyed a strong resurgence in connection with Anti-globalization activism.

Fascism, in many respects, is an ideology of negativism: anti-liberal, anti-Communist, anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, etc. As a political and economic system in Italy, it combined elements of corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-communism.

http://www.politicsdefined.com/content/fascism.htm


Sometimes, what one THINKS the definition is, isn't the actual definition, if one puts one's nose in a book. This is one of those cases.

It never takes the conversation anywhere productive.

I havea phd in Poli Sci, so, please don't insult/question my knowledge of any of the 'isms'. That's an argument you won't win with me.

Because if you HAD been aware of it, you wouldn't have snarked at me like you did. And snark IS what you did.

You slept through the classes on Marx and Mussolini, is that it?

There's no other excuse, unless you plead ignorance--"PhD" notwithstanding. I'd speak to my doctoral advisors about a partial refund if I were you, because you didn't get your money's worth.