U.S. Fascism - Chapter One

Establishment

Big business drives U.S. fascism, which thrives under both capitalist political factions. Propaganda and intelligence agencies protect and advance the interests of the U.S. ruling class.

Big Business

The working class comprises everyone who puts in a day’s labor for a wage. Known as the 99%, the working class creates a corporation’s profit but is not allowed to make the decisions in a given corporation.

The ruling class is in charge. Known as the 1%, its goal is to maximize profit. When it comes to the military-industrial complex, the ruling class is mostly comprised of:

• Executives and the board. The job of the corporate executive is to maximize short-term corporate profit. The board of directors makes sure the executive does this.

• Leaders of financial firms.

  • Most war corporations (“defense companies”) are public, i.e., they issue stock that is traded on exchanges. Large banks and asset management firms (e.g., BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard) hold a lot of this stock. These banks and firms are the institutional stockholders at the top of the war industry. Banks also provide loans and lines of credit to war corporations and advise in mergers and acquisitions.

  • A private equity firm is a different kind of financial organization. It is composed of a few wealthy people who buy a corporation, restructure it, and try to sell it at a profit. Private equity has in its hands everything from news media to grocery stores to war corporations.

• Billionaires and tycoons.

Elected officials and top bureaucrats cater to the 1% and help steer the ship.

• Elected officials on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees in the Senate and House, and the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House and the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate. Instead of exercising strict oversight of military and espionage activities, they accept campaign funding from the war industry, coordinate with the industry’s main tools (e.g., lobbying firms), and pass legislation expanding and empowering armed bureaucracies and enriching industry. Politicians come and go. The structure endures.

• Top bureaucrats administering military and intelligence organizations. A California Congressman, for example, became a White House insider in the 1990s, and then a presidential appointee in the 2000s administering CIA and then the Pentagon. Meanwhile, most U.S. military officers who ascend to the highest rank (inflating threats all the while) retire with six figure pensions and then grab more money by joining war corporations, lobbying firms, or financial institutions.

The industry forms a mighty bloc—some members are notorious, others relatively unknown.¹

Sure, the war industry sells bombs, tanks, ships, and aircraft. It also sells base operations, espionage software, physical security, artificial intelligence, nuclear weaponry, border sensors, ways to knock drones out of the sky, information technology, cloud computing, satellites, satellite launch, office administration, construction, missile defense systems, warehousing and distribution, ordnance disposal, small arms, radar, maintenance and cataloguing of prepositioned matériel, logistics and consulting, training and simulation, and more.

Corporations don’t just sell such products and call it a day. They fabricate, test, evaluate, qualify, assemble, inspect, package, deliver, maintain, upgrade, and monitor products—all billable activities. Additionally, these corporations regularly charge their military and intelligence customers for such services as configuration management, data, documentation, incidental materials, integration, “obsolescence management,” operational security, parts, spares, support equipment, and technical order updates. Industry can’t help but view a U.S. military installation as a dollar sign. All such installations, whether located in the United States or abroad, are avenues through which corporations route goods and services. The troops (soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, guardian) are mostly not cannon fodder, as was the case in World War I. They are users of corporate goods and services.

Fascist Brew

The capitalists at the helm of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies learned over time how to secure the interests of big business. Doing so requires squashing independent-minded governments, installing pliant regimes, and even invading countries to forcibly create new markets. Major General Smedley Butler did just that during his military career, which spanned the military occupation of the Philippines, the Boxer Rebellion, and multiple invasions of Latin American countries, including the occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). He was, in his own words, a “racketeer for capitalism” and a “high-class muscle man for Big Business.” His firsthand understanding that big U.S. businesses and banks were profiting through war gradually radicalized him.

General Butler understood that the ruling class doesn’t actually care about the troops. In the early 1930s, U.S. veterans of World War I and their families marched across the country to the nation’s capital and pitched their tents in protest. Their demand? That Washington finally pay them a bonus promised to them after winning that war. By summer 1932, the protest had become a large, diverse working-class coalition united by a common cause. In forcibly removing the veterans from their encampments, local law enforcement maimed many and killed two. President Herbert Hoover then called in the U.S. Army, including tanks and cavalry, who burned the veterans’ shelters and fired chemical weapons at them and their families. Only in 1936 did these troops at last receive the money owed to them.

General Butler understood fascism’s roots. As he testified to U.S. Congress in November 1934, a prominent Wall Street brokerage had tried to recruit him to help overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt in order to end the New Deal. The plotting capitalists reportedly included J.P. Morgan Jr., Wall Street broker Gerald C. MacGuire, and banker Grayson M. P. Murphy. Though President Roosevelt’s New Deal would ultimately extend capitalism’s life for another hundred years, these bankers and industrialists were furious with the president for implementing social programs and financial regulation. The plot failed, but the fascist brew—big business—remained.

The fascists’ aircraft in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) ran on Texas oil. The founders of the Third Reich, meanwhile, looked toward the racist marvels of the U.S. ruling class (extermination of the indigenous population, chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws) when crafting their own fascist state. Big U.S. businesses, reportedly including IBM and General Motors, helped German fascism rise. Upon the collapse of the Third Reich, largely thanks to the immense sacrifices of the Soviet Union, the U.S. government swooped in and recruited many prominent Nazi scientists to populate its nascent rocket program headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama. CIA also recruited top Nazis, such as Reinhard Gehlen, to help run post-war espionage in Eastern Europe.²

Entrenching

Riding high after World War II, U.S. fascism—the U.S. military-industrial complex—was the most powerful force on the planet in terms of technological prowess and political mobilization. The complex positioned the USSR, which was devastated after the war, as an aggressive power bent on world domination. This threat inflation, a tactic military and industry would use again and again, increased military and intelligence budgets, upon which industry feasted, and justified invasive legal authorities.³

Demonizing any strong political ideologies that rejected big business in favor of mutual aid and community, U.S. government and industry expanded worldwide, using as an excuse the imminent arrival of dreaded communist hordes. From Greece and the Philippines in the 1940s through Central America in the 1980s, no country was off-limits.

The system builds momentum for ongoing military and economic warfare, home and abroad, through propaganda. Propaganda is “the dissemination of biased or false information to promote a political cause.” It manipulates “the beliefs of the recipient to align with the aims of the propagandist,” professors Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall explain in Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror.⁴ U.S. propaganda precedes, is amplified during, and follows open physical warfare. It is issued by different groups, including the Pentagon, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and CIA. Often overlooked or dismissed, U.S. propaganda sways the species in favor of fascist objectives.

Fearing the massive labor unrest that rocked the U.S. following World War II, the diverse peoples clambering for democratic representation within the country, and the ongoing attempt at a worker-first society in the Soviet Union, U.S. government officials implemented U.S. fascism’s foundational legislation: The Labor Management Relations Act and the National Security Act, both of 1947. The former banned many practices that the working class could use to organize and resist capitalist greed and successfully foiled socialist and communist organizing within union spaces. The National Security Act then reorganized and expanded the Armed Forces and formally established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council. While many countries would obtain independence from European colonial powers during the mid-twentieth century, none have obtained independence from Western financial institutions, let alone Five Eyes monitoring of their electronic communications.

Neoliberalism is an economic policy that hands governmental functions to corporations. This process of “privatization” turns public space into corporate profit. Neoliberalism also deregulates industries, leading to widespread pollution, and often reduces federal spending on programs of social uplift, such as healthcare and public housing. Capitalists launched neoliberalism in the late 1960s in order to revive their profits, which had been weakened slightly through union organizing, working-class consciousness, and environmental awareness. In embracing neoliberalism, the two capitalist political factions—Republican and Democratic—abandoned any remaining intention to care for the U.S. working class. Public relations specialists presented neoliberal economics as just letting “the market” do its thing.

The fascist structure adjusted as it wound down one war, Vietnam, in favor of others in Angola, Latin America, and the Eastern Mediterranean. A charismatic investment banker and former Pentagon chief, Thomas Gates, led a fifteen-person commission during the Nixon administration to study the pros and cons of ending the military draft. The commission was largely a rogues’ gallery of capitalists, including shock-doctrine economist Milton Friedman, former DuPont president Crawford Greenewalt, future Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, and the first black member of the board of the New York Stock Exchange, Jerome Holland. Gates wined and dined top military and civilian leaders before introducing the commission’s report. In February 1970, he formally presented President Richard Nixon with the commission’s recommendation to end the draft.

The All-Volunteer Force was then established in 1973. The poor and working class would be the ones fighting the wars. No more illusions of shared sacrifice. The All-Volunteer Force and accompanying propaganda have rendered the U.S. military one of the most trusted institutions in the country. A leap in class warfare, ending the draft has reduced the likelihood of an internal military revolt, the likes of which the U.S. military experienced during the latter half of the Vietnam War when enlisted infantry disobeyed orders, refused to fight, and even killed officers who ordered them on patrol.

Democratic Party Significance

Moscow and Washington distorted their respective economies in the arms race and proxy wars of the Cold War. Moscow’s buckled first. General Secretary of the Soviet Union Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, contributed by prying open portions of authority in Moscow. When the Soviet Union collapsed, U.S.- and U.K.-based financial firms leapt into action, plundering the economies of the former Soviet Union and turning 1990s’ Russia into one of the worst peacetime economic depressions on record.

In giving the military-industrial complex immense legal authorities at a time when it should have been stomped out, the William J. Clinton White House, 1993-2000, demonstrated how crucial the Democratic faction is to the fascist structure.

In the name of security, fascist regimes persuade the public that human rights do not apply to certain groups.

• The 1994 policy of Prevention Through Deterrence funneled undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border into the inhospitable Sonoran Desert and further militarized the boundary between Mexico and the U.S.

• The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act allowed greater use of classified evidence in court and the deportation of immigrants convicted of a minor crime.

• The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act expanded the “crime of moral turpitude” catch-all in U.S. immigration law, which authorities can use to remove immigrants from the country.

• The Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996 made it very difficult for prisoners to file lawsuits in federal court, giving prison administrators more room to violate constitutional rights.

Fascist regimes prioritize law and order and give law enforcement loose rein.

• The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 expanded federal policing authority, ballooned law enforcement’s ranks, allocated billions of dollars to the prison system, and eliminated basic grants for federal and state prisoner education, making it practically impossible for the poor and working class to receive a higher education while behind bars.

• The Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division was also created in 1994 as the White House was ramping up the war on drugs.

• The 1997 National Defense Authorization Act expanded the 1033 Program, through which the U.S. military transfers excess military equipment to local and state law enforcement, to include “counterterrorism” products.

Fascist regimes guard and enhance the power of big business while the enabling the exploitation of the working class.

• The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1993 helped multinational corporations better exploit worker and land, eliminating many barriers to corporate activity across the continent.

• The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 gutted welfare, brutalizing the poor and working class.

• The Telecommunications Act of the same year deregulated the telecoms, leading to the further propagandizing of the public with capitalist thought while consolidating news media into the hands of a relative few massive corporations and tycoons. And, instead of regulating the nascent internet like a public utility (e.g., radio, telephone), Washington allowed large corporations to guide the internet’s infancy and adolescence.

• The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 further deregulated and removed oversight from Wall Street, permitting the risky and predatory behavior that would later crash the economy. (No top banker who oversaw the push for such policies or implemented those policies prior to the crash received a second of jailtime.)

Fascists regimes carry out dangerous policies in the name of “national security.”

• The 1973 War Powers Resolution states that if a president deploys troops into hostilities and does not get Congressional authorization within two months, the president must withdraw those troops. In June 1993, the Clinton administration’s Office of Legal Counsel flavored this 60-day clock as unconstitutional in extreme circumstances, giving the Executive Branch more elbowroom to deploy troops without Congressional approval.

• The war industry, meanwhile, was doubling down on the corporatization of the military; jobs once carried out by the troops, such as base operations and training, were further delivered to corporate hands.

• In 1994, U.S. Congress passed, and President Clinton signed into law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires U.S. communications corporations to “engineer their facilities so their network can easily be monitored” by the U.S. government, explains James Bamford, foremost expert on the National Security Agency. The Act even requires corporations to “install the eavesdropping devices themselves if necessary, and then never reveal their existence,” Bamford notes (pp. 210-211). CALEA’s passage helped create a large market for corporations selling domestic surveillance products (p. 236).

• The Clinton administration wrapped up its tenure by ushering the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The alliance’s standardization of weaponry guarantees regular European purchases from the U.S. war industry.

Fascist regimes rally the public over the need to eliminate a common threat.

• Executive Order 12957 of 1995 expanded sanctions against Iran’s oil sector and declared that “the actions and policies of the Government of Iran constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” The Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 punished any U.S. business that dared to deal with those two countries.

• The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (“Helms-Burton Act”) of 1996 expanded and tightened the U.S. embargo (more accurately described as a siege) of Cuba and bullied the Cuban people. These acts further strangled the island nation that had dared to forge a different economic model.

• The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act weakened habeas corpus, increased penalties for people convicted of terrorism, and created the U.S. government’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list.

• Military, industry, and their respective and overlapping think tanks and media inflated Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a threat, which the Pentagon used to maintain a constellation of bases across the Persian Gulf. Hussein was an Arab leader who occasionally deviated from Washington’s edicts, though Washington had enjoyed a tight relationship with him as it played both sides during the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988.

• The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 made regime change in Baghdad official U.S. government policy.

• President Clinton approved the launch of ordnance at multiple countries, killing civilians in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, and Sudan. Highlights included the 1998 bombing of the Shifa’ pharmaceutical factory in greater Khartoum, Sudan, and the 1999 bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia.

Fascist regimes are obsessed with secrecy and pretend that it is a matter of “national security.”

• President Clinton signed Executive Order 12958 in April 1995, refining special access programs. These programs put in place safeguards and “access requirements that exceed those normally required for information at the same classification level,” the Executive Order explained. The subsequent proliferation of special access programs greatly decreased transparency while expanding the permanent warfare state. Within fifteen years, the Pentagon’s list of special access program names—just the list of the names—had grown to 300 pages.⁵

U.S. military and industry never let the military budget fall below $280 billion (roughly $570 billion in 2022 dollars) during the 1990s. Industry also pursued more sales overseas, including to Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, the House of Saud, and Israel.

Corporations merged and acquired one another during the 1990s. Larger moves included Boeing merging with McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed merging with Martin Marietta, and Raytheon acquiring Hughes Aircraft. Campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures increased. And more and more titans of capital revolved through corporate suites, the civilian offices of armed bureaucracies, and back. The military contracting system was further rigged in favor of corporations in part because, after decades of neoliberal economic policies shoving government function into corporate hands, the U.S. government that fundamentally lacked any real, independent capability to produce weapons of war.

The way legal teams and public relations specialists present a corporation today does not reflect the corporation’s actual activities. A given war corporation postures as a “defense company,” a leading provider of “solutions” to the U.S. government. A dedicated innovator, it enhances and accelerates the customer’s ability to ensure future success. More than just a company, it is a partner dedicated to integrity and excellence. Reality, however, is not so rosy. The corporation’s personnel and products can be found analyzing detailed maps of the Earth using proprietary software, running computer networks for portions of military intelligence, managing satellite control networks and tracking stations, overseeing military medical logistics, training counterintelligence personnel for the Defense Intelligence Agency, upgrading the system that the U.S. Army uses to pay its soldiers, and contributing to decisions regarding the production of an overbudget and underperforming class of warship.

Structural Imperative

President Clinton was not unique. Gerald Ford got the railroad-deregulation ball rolling by signing the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976. Jimmy Carter furthered his work with the 1980 Staggers Rail Act, deregulated the airline industry (1978 Airline Deregulation Act) and the trucking industry (1980 Motor Carrier Act), and helped coax the Egyptian government into making peace with the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Carter also signed into law the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities and nonprofits to file patents on technologies developed through projects funded with federal money. Corporations leapt into action after this removal of public-licensing restrictions, further swarming military and espionage research.

Ronald Reagan crushed the federal air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 and in the same year signed Executive Order 12333, which became the preferred legal foundation governing much of NSA’s overseas surveillance (and some domestic). Espionage under EO 12333 is not subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. More on that in a bit. Reagan also ballooned military and intelligence budgets and unleashed dirty wars throughout Central America. In 1987 his Federal Communications Commission abolished the Fairness Doctrine, which until then had required media to attempt to present matters of public interest through multiple viewpoints. George H. W. Bush sent troops to Panamá and Iraq, oversaw Cold War victory, and expanded NATO. George W. Bush unleashed the profitable “war on terror,” which Barack Obama later expanded. Obama then facilitated the military-industrial pivot against Beijing and Moscow and allowed greater government propaganda in U.S. media.⁶

U.S. presidents are under immense structural pressure. They channel this pressure, for example, by launching drone strikes, increasing deportations, or approving massive military and intelligence budgets. A president cannot spend limited political capital on dismantling the fascist structure that exerts this pressure. If any president dared to do so, assuming that such a person hadn’t thoroughly compromised all morals when ascending to the top of federal authority, military and big business would turn up the heat (igniting congress via lobbying and campaign finance, strengthening media and think tank operations against the president’s policies, and stoking fear via corporate media) and wait that president out.

Historian Daniel Immerwahr has calculated that from World War II through 2020 the U.S. government engaged in open armed conflict during all but two years, 1977 and 1979.⁷ The U.S. government, however, was engaged in worldwide covert operations against workers, trade unionists, and leftist movements, particularly a dirty war in Angola and Operation Condor in Latin America during the late 1970s. So, really, at no point after World War II has the U.S. government chosen peace. Fascism can’t choose peace.

Corporate Ascent

Corporate ceremony and legal documentation are the foundation of big business. If a certified lawyer follows the proper rituals, writes the required assurances and principles on an ornate piece of paper, and signs formally at the bottom, then presto—a new business is incorporated. When successful, such ritual and formality gives business incredible power, because it helps millions of strangers work toward a common goal, as explained well in Yuval Harari’s Sapiens (pp. 30-31). Unfortunately for human and planetary health, the singular goal of a corporation is maximization of short-term profit. A corporation is a fabricated entity legally distinct from the people who establish it, run it, or invest money in it. A corporation is dealt with, legally, as a person.⁸

The strengthening of corporate authority enhanced the fascist state. Lewis Powell, a corporate lawyer, lobbyist, and future Supreme Court Justice, wrote a memo in 1971—a confidential call to arms titled Attack on American Free Enterprise System—to U.S. business executives. It reflected corporate leaders’ fears of the democratic gains the public had attained during the 1960s. After demonizing the Left and misrepresenting the existing nature of U.S. government, the memo outlined tactics to increase corporate authority, including but not limited to flooding media, academic journals, and universities with capitalist ideology; eradicating existing regulation and preventing new regulation that might infringe on maximization of profits (e.g., legislation improving water quality or reducing pollution); increasing scope and intensity of federal lobbying; and stacking the courts with uncompromising capitalists. The Business Roundtable, the lobbying association steered by top executives, was established the year after Powell issued his memo. The ensuing five decades were defined by corporate success: establishing prosperous think tanks to spread information helpful to those who fund the think tanks, shrinking union membership, adding more “right to work” states, stifling wages, funneling jobs overseas, and transferring more and more wealth to the richest humans in society.

A billion is one thousand million. The United States has more billionaires than any other country. Top billionaires use their money to influence the political process. Prominent among them are men who’ve obtained their billions in the U.S. financial system. Billionaire financial tycoons who have reportedly allocated money to the political process include Seth Klarman, Daniel Loeb, Robert Mercer, Stephen Schwarzman, Jim Simons, Paul Singer, and S. Donald Sussman. Billionaire military-industrial-complex tycoons include David Rubenstein of private equity firm The Carlyle Group, Elon Musk of SpaceX, Fatih and Eren Ozmen of Sierra Nevada Corporation, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Peter Thiel of Palantir, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Some billionaires are very hands-on. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has reportedly funded startups in the war industry, toured military bases, chaired such influential bodies as the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Board, and accessed the White House during the Obama and Biden administrations. Hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin has reportedly funded Chicago police units that use big-data technologies in investigations. Sometimes billionaires actively help U.S. intelligence agencies, like when Ross Perot provided funds for Oliver North’s scheme within the Reagan administration to buy the freedom of U.S. citizens who had been taken hostage during Lebanon’s civil war, as documented in Tim Weiner’s Blank Check (p. 207).

The U.S. Supreme Court regularly boosts corporate authority. In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that limits on election spending were unconstitutional. Money was henceforth free speech. In 1978, the court determined that corporations had a First Amendment right to put money toward ballot initiatives, striking down a Massachusetts law designed to protect voters from corporate influence. In 1986, the court gave corporations more elbow room to influence the political process by utilizing nonprofits. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, such as Business Executives for National Security or the National Defense Industrial Association, does have to file a Form 990 each year with the Internal Revenue Service but does not have to disclose the identity of its donors. In 2010, the court further distorted the First Amendment’s free speech clause by allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political contributions. In 2014, it got rid of limits on the total number of political contributions one could give over a two-year period. A corporation (corporate person) now enjoys far more legal rights and political influence than a human person.

A united working class is the only real threat to fascism. Therefore, labor unions must be suppressed. In May 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations could prohibit employees from joining forces and taking a corporation to court (Epic Systems v. Lewis). In June 2018, it ruled that workers could get union benefits without paying dues—in other words, non-union workers who benefitted from union-negotiated contracts didn’t have to pay dues to the unions that had negotiated the contracts (Janus v. AFSCME). Unionization rates are at their lowest in the United States since 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available. Wages are stagnant.⁹ U.S. corporations, from Amazon through Walmart, stifle worker organizing. Corporate crime goes largely unpunished.

Elections in fascist countries are often rigged. In the United States, it is money from big business rigging the show. Both capitalist factions (Red and Blue) are awash in dark money, untraceable money funneled through nonprofits. Public opinion has little to no effect on federal policy, as explained in the famous study by Gilens and Page. The Commission on Presidential Debates, a corporation comprised of operatives from the two main capitalist political factions, long ago stopped allowing third parties to participate. Factions engage in massive gerrymandering and negative advertising to gain political edge. Occasionally, the highest court in the land weighs in to help one of the two capitalist factions, as it did in Bush v. Gore.

Funneling Creativity

The largest technological project in the United States since World War II has been war- and espionage-related research and development (R&D) and manufacturing. No other technological endeavor comes close in terms of dollars and human effort. The U.S. military budget was roughly $740 billion in fiscal 2021, roughly $750 billion the following year, and, as of this writing in 2022, an expected $850 billion for fiscal 2023. Over half of this money goes to corporations, including academic institutions.

The war industry funnels the creativity of workers (programmers, engineers, scientists) into instruments useful to the fascist state. The working class—people who put in a day’s work for a wage—is directed to research, develop, and manufacture the goods, and deliver the services. These workers are in a tight spot: As corporate executives and politicians have automated and outsourced jobs and defunded the social safety net, a job in the war industry is often the only decent option in town. With so many people unemployed and underemployed, capitalists get to pick relatively passive laborers for war-industry jobs: the ones who keep their heads down and do not raise a fuss. Purchasing the expensive necessities of life (e.g. food, healthcare, rent, utilities) requires that those workers continue to sell their labor (the products of which maim and kill the working class in other countries), enriching the ruling class.

Jobs for workers in the war industry range from manual labor (blaster, electrician, machinist, pipefitter, painter, rigger, shipwright, welder) to office employee (public relations specialist, paralegal, lawyer, lobbyist) to brain (computer programmer, engineer, physicist, chemist, mathematician). The profit that the workers create goes to the ruling class: executive greed (CEO pay at the top five war corporations totaled almost half a billion dollars during 2015-2019); dividends for shareholders; stock buybacks; and building new facilities through which to create more profit.

The ruling class inundates the working class with advertising, propaganda, and disinformation in order to keep the workers, who greatly outnumber the capitalists, passive and compliant. To what propaganda do the workers cling in order to justify working in the war industry?

• Civilian use. Employees of war corporations invoke the civilian application of military technology: The internet, the jet engine, and radar came from military funding. But these are ancillary benefits. And unlike products from other industries, the public cannot eat, consume, play with, learn from, or interact with most products sold by the war industry. Imagine what technological benefits society could achieve if hundreds of billions of dollars per year were directed intentionally toward development of technology that benefitted human wellbeing and the natural world, not war and espionage.

• Distancing. Theoretical physicist Edward Teller after guiding the creation of the hydrogen bomb stated, “The use of weapons is none of my business, and I will have none of it” (Halberstam, The Fifties, p. 99). Distancing helps people focus on their daily tasks. They rarely take the time to understand how harmful the military-industrial complex truly is.

• Traditional patriotism rallies a person around the flag. It divides the workers of the world along arbitrary borders. And it never makes the MIC accountable or changes government when it is polluted and destructive.

• Supporting the troops. Some people justify working for the war industry by saying they do it for the troops. Journalist Jeffrey Stern describes how one machinist at a missile factory rationalizes his role: Believing his work helped to keep the troops safe, the machinist derives great pride in his work. Raytheon “makes a point of hiring veterans with combat injuries, which reminds him of whom he’s working for and why,” Jeffrey Stern explains. “He feels it when he sees the gigantic photos of service members”—relatives of Raytheon workers—which “the company hangs in the most prominent parts of the plant.” When the machinist is in the factory, “the notion of helping American servicemen and women is not abstract. It’s almost tactile.”

• Some people have no morals and therefore need no pretense to work in such a destructive industry. Many, blissfully comfortable with the paycheck that the war industry offers, are simply selfish.

A few people within military and industry recognize the gravity of the situation—that funneling so much toward war and espionage harms U.S. security because these pursuits drain human effort, time, and public funds, and forestall social care—but are afraid of the consequences of speaking up. Group think, compartmentation, economic incentive, nondisclosure agreements, the allure of secrecy, and the chain of command enforce the status quo. Violence and social isolation deter the few who think about pushing back against the machinery of war. The minor whistleblower is ostracized and demoted, the leaker locked up.

Effective creativity is based on free, open discussion. The secrecy (compartmentation, classification, near-term deadlines, stovepiped fields) inherent to war-industry production stifles that free and open discussion. The free thinker and the uninhibited tinkerer do not thrive in the confines of the military-industrial complex. Although it lures many brilliant programmers, engineers, scientists, and mathematicians with its financial and emotional appeal, U.S. fascism cannot focus on the breakthroughs that society needs.

The working class suffocates together: families whose countries the U.S. military irradiated and poisoned using industry’s munitions, as it did with depleted uranium in Iraq; civilians in New York City who contracted respiratory ailments and cancer after breathing near Ground Zero; people, who joined the U.S. military because it was one of the few paths remaining for socioeconomic advancement, and now suffer respiratory ailments and cancer after being exposed to burn pits during overseas deployments;¹⁰ and families who lived in the vicinity of U.S. military bases or industry factories that have produced or discharged toxins (e.g., per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, toxic sludge, radioactive waste).

Clearance

As capitalism is the overarching ideological propellant of U.S. fascism, the security clearance (intertwined with money) is the core conceptual glue of participants in the fascist state. A clearance is official authorization to access classified information—CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, TOP SECRET. The higher the classification the greater the supposed damage to “national security” if the world were to know the information.

When determining whether an individual is to be granted a security clearance, investigators first look for money problems. Are there any major red flags, such as a pattern of reckless gambling? Has the person repeatedly racked up large debts? Investigators want to see a person who would likely not be susceptible to bribery by a foreign government. The second main quality an investigator looks for is deviation from political-economic orthodoxy. Partisan red/blue affiliation and libertarianism are acceptable. Socialism, communism, and anarchism are not. This immediately weeds out people who dare to think beyond how they’re conditioned and people who operate in favor of intraspecies cooperation. Strong work against D.C.’s wars, home or abroad, is also an automatic disqualifier.

Today, background investigations of persons seeking clearance or clearance renewal are largely done by corporations (contracting often with the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency) and corporate products, including algorithms. Well over one million people have SECRET clearance. Hundreds of thousands have TOP SECRET. It is not an exclusive club. People who have obtained a security clearance know their meal ticket. (When I was in the military, I was told repeatedly by contractors and senior enlisted personnel that their clearance was their meal ticket. Most described their clearance as the way to a lifetime of solid wealth.) They do not risk speaking out resolutely against prevailing groupthink, particularly against the dominant lens of U.S. international relations (e.g., Cold War, war on terror). Rigid are the boundaries confining those with clearance, which all top MIC officials have.

The Community

The fascist nature of the Central Intelligence Agency needs no introduction: aggressive nationalism; disdain for democratic rule after attaining authority through a nominally democratic system; support from members of the working class for whom things have gone awry; and inflating the threat of villains (Iran, North Korea, “terror,” Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, China) against which it flexes. CIA’s case officers recruit individuals who are likely to rise within military, economic, political, or entertainment positions in their home countries. These recruits are the spies who provide information to the Agency. When the locals inevitably rally in a given country to reassert control over their government and/or resources, CIA tries to get rid of them (sometimes via coup or assassination) in order to maintain capitalists in, or return capitalists to, authority. The successful destruction of worker groups around the world—from demolishing Greek and Italian socialists and anarchists in the 1940s, to implementing anti-worker coups in Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, to the mass killing of the political Left in Indonesia in the 1960s—positions CIA as the premier fascist organization harming the working class.

While CIA doesn’t openly embrace racial superiority, it considers Latin America its “backyard” and has successfully supported or installed brutal regimes from Bogotá to Amman to Taipei, assassinated African leaders, sympathized with the whites of Apartheid South Africa,¹¹ killed brown and black people via drones, and contributed to the slaughter of millions of brown people. CIA is constantly adapting in order to stay relevant and alluring for public relations and recruitment purposes.

CIA’s fascism is also evident in its use of proprietaries, which are businesses it owns directly or indirectly: an airline, a bank, a logistics firm, a lumber mill, a publishing house—anything useful in espionage or covert activity. For example, say you, an Agency official, wanted greater access to the Arab world. One way to achieve this would be to establish a nonprofit that focused on providing educational services, such as English language training, test administration, academic scholarships to Western universities, and study abroad. You set up offices in most major cities in the Middle East and North Africa. Your nonprofit becomes the go-to means of getting into the United States for high school or university. Thousands of teenagers and young adults pass through your program each year. You have information on all of them. As an added bonus, CIA’s proprietaries can earn revenue outside of official federal budgets.

U.S. intelligence more broadly is fascist in that it has embraced the bundling, gradually allowing much of its workload to be taken over by business—the “contractors” of the war industry. Some intelligence organizations, such as the National Reconnaissance Office, which is in charge of designing and launching satellites, are more corporatized than others.

Every portion of the massive U.S. intelligence apparatus (the U.S. “intelligence community,” in official euphemism) offers a way to monitor or harm the workers of the world. The Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, for example, cuts off any person and any group that firmly or violently opposes U.S. foreign policy. The National Security Agency penetrates and monitors electronic communications. DEA’s Office of National Security Intelligence and FBI’s Intelligence Branch monitor and stifle the working class within the U.S. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence manages the apparatus.¹²

The military-industrial complex adeptly allies with other governments. It offers financing, military training, arms sales, and more to convince the hesitant. It dominates the primary English-speaking intelligence-sharing group known as Five Eyes (Washington, Ottawa, London, Canberra, Wellington). It allies separately with regimes in the Middle East, primary among them Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. These regimes employ their own intelligence agencies, Western technology, coordination with U.S. intelligence, and patronage networks in order to stifle democracy in their respective countries.

U.S. fascism is allied with the Israeli state. Israel offers its intelligence abilities, particularly covert action, to U.S. government. This relationship blossomed during James Angleton’s reign as head of CIA counterintelligence (1954-75). Israel’s alliance with U.S. fascism also involves the annual receipt of billions of U.S. tax dollars, which it uses to purchase from U.S. industry. The Israeli war industry sells goods and services to the instruments of the U.S. ruling class (FBI, CIA, DHS, DOD), just as the U.S. war industry sells to Israel. The Christian Right in the U.S., believing that Jews must control Palestine before the battle of Armageddon can take place, supports Israel fervently.¹³ While the Christian Right is nationalist and open to authoritarian leadership, it is not the core fascist movement. The military-industrial complex is.

Faking It

Fascist leaders seize any attack—genuine, staged, or invented—against the U.S. in order to push for war. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident of 1964 is one such attack that never happened, but which paved the way for war. Under Operation Northwoods of 1962, which was never implemented, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff planned to attack targets within the U.S., including a civilian airliner, and blame the attacks on Cuba, thereby justifying U.S. military action against the Caribbean island. District attorney Jim Garrison described the visceral nature of fascism at the Southern California Broadcasters 1967 award dinner: It’s the “situation you have when a government is allowed to lie with equanimity…” It is “what you have when the fraud perpetrated by the government, and the big lie, becomes acceptable, because the government is so powerful that individuals and even many publications are afraid to oppose it.”

In times of perceived danger, the public looks to the state for protection. This protection comes in the form of enhanced fascist activity: greater global military deployment, expanded legal authorities for government bureaucracies, further militarization of law enforcement, a bigger crackdown on dissent, and increased military and espionage expenditures.

The lies used to start a war are brazen. In the lead-up to the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, the Reagan administration presented the press with satellite photos of a large airfield being built on the island, inflated the number of Cubans there, and lied about the goals of the country’s ruling New Joint Endeavor for Welfare, Education, and Liberation (New JEWEL). To push the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panamá, the Bush administration painted Panamanian General Manuel Noriega as a cunning drug trafficker and money launderer, lied about the nature of the December 16th death of a U.S. Marine who had tried to run a Panamanian roadblock, and didn’t mention the fact that Noriega had been on CIA’s payroll. The young woman who told U.S. Congress in 1990 that Saddam Hussein’s troops took “babies out of the incubators… and left the children to die on the cold floor” of a Kuwaiti hospital later turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The public relations firm Hill & Knowlton had reportedly helped coordinate her testimony. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell testified in 2003 to the U.N. Security Council that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice testified to the same forum roughly eight years later that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was supplying his troops with Viagra so they could commit mass rape.

Conclusion

The military-industrial complex is a behemoth. Its greatest advantage is public ignorance of its fascist nature.

The structure had survived the loss of its ostensible reason for being, the Soviet Union, and was sitting pretty heading into a crisp autumn day.

1. Massive corporations—Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, L3Harris, HII, Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, Honeywell, CACI, SAIC, V2X, KBR, Textron—produced a wide variety of goods and services pertaining to military and intelligence. For Defense News’ Top 100 Defense Companies, see <https://people.defensenews.com/top-100>. In 2023, the main private corporations in the business were General Atomics and Sierra Nevada Corporation, owned by the brothers Linden and Neal Blue and spouses Eren and Fatih Ozmen, respectively. Private equity firms in the business included Advent International (owned Ultra and Cobham), Cerberus Capital (owned Red River and Tier One Group), Lindsay Goldberg (co-owned Amentum), and Veritas Capital (owned Aptim, Cubic, and Peraton). Some corporations, such as General Electric making engines, focused mostly on one type of military product. Project management firms flocked to military and intelligence budgets: AECOM, Fluor, Jacobs, KBR, Parsons, Tetra Tech. Consulting firms—Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co., Systems Planning & Analysis Inc., and Whitney Bradley & Brown—made recommendations to military leadership. The military had yet to pass an audit, which was carried out by Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Grant Thornton, Kearney & Co., KPMG, and PwC. These accounting firms also did some consulting for the Pentagon.

Large multinational corporations headquartered outside the U.S. (e.g. London’s BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce, Dublin’s Accenture, Stockholm’s Saab AB, Paris’ Thales, Rome’s Leonardo DRS, Haifa’s Elbit Systems) sold regularly to the U.S. military. Massive technology corporations—the one that made your cell phone and laptop, the one you used for internet searches, the one you used to buy stuff online—did sizeable business with U.S. military and intelligence. Corporations constantly bought and sold one another’s business segments. Corporations influenced government via lobbying, financing electoral campaigns, funding think tanks that created interventionist narratives, and utilizing 501(c) nonprofits to “educate constituencies.”

2. Fred Koch’s company Winkler-Koch helped build a massive oil refinery for the Third Reich, Jane Mayer reported in her bestselling book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016). Fred Koch was the father of billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. David L. Robertson, chief operating officer of Koch Industries, insisted in 2016 that Koch’s work for the Nazis—machinery that helped convert crude oil into petroleum products—predated World War II and was among many of the company’s international projects. See Nicholas Confessore, “Koch Executive Disputes Book’s Account of Founder’s Role in Nazi Refinery” (NYT, 12 Jan 2016). The Gehlen Organization, predecessor to Germany’s current foreign intelligence agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst, is chronicled in David Talbot’s The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

3. The MIC consistently inflated the Soviet Union as a threat (bomber gap, missile gap, spending gap), justifying increased U.S. investment in war. Where there was initially no threat (e.g., intercontinental ballistic missiles), U.S. military and industry invented one. Whenever a country’s armed forces maneuvered defensively or tested or amassed weaponry in reaction to Washington’s aggression, the fascist structure would frame such defensive behavior as aggression, thereby justifying further expansion of U.S. militarism (including weapon sales to U.S. allies). Whenever an enemy achieved sound scientific progress, such as when the Soviet space program launched the artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, in October 1957, the MIC claimed that the peaceful achievement was a threat to the U.S., thereby demanding greater military spending and softening up the public for increased militarization of that area—space, in this case. Director of the Strategic Forces Division within the Pentagon’s former Office of Systems Analysis, Ivan Selin, used to say, “Welcome to the world of strategic analysis, where we program weapons that don’t work to meet threats that don’t exist” (quoted in Cockburn, “The New Red Scare,” Harper’s, Dec 2016). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was established in 1949 to steer Western European militaries against the Soviets. The classified policy paper, NSC 68, penned in 1950 and approved in 1951, inflated the USSR as a threat and laid out D.C.’s militarized approach to world affairs.

4. Coyne and Hall explain propaganda in Manufacturing Militarism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021), pp. xiii-xiv, 16-17, 24. When ostensibly democratic governments use propaganda, they use “the vocabulary of liberal democracy” to “mask an undemocratic reality,” Jason Stanley explains in How Propaganda Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 11. In other words, democratic governments use persuasive, kind wording in their propaganda, helping to disguise the fact that they’re not really democratic.

5. Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Back Bay Books, 2011), pp. 25-26.

6. NDAA 2013 (Public Law 112-239), Subtitle H, Section 1078, “Revises provisions of the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 authorizing the Secretary of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to provide for the preparation and dissemination of information intended for foreign audiences abroad about the United States, including about its people and policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, the Internet, and other information media, including social media, and through information centers and instructors. Authorizes the Secretary and the Board to make available in the United States motion pictures, films, video, audio, and other materials disseminated abroad pursuant to such Act, the United States International Broadcasting Act of 1994, the Radio Broadcasting to Cuba Act, or the Television Broadcasting to Cuba Act. Amends the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of Fiscal Years 1986 and 1987 to remove statutory limitations on the ability of the Board and the State Department to provide information about their activities to the media, the public, or Congress.” In 2019, John Lansing moved from guiding official propaganda at the U.S. Agency for Global Media to running NPR.

7. In “Fort Everywhere”, Prof. Immerwahr does not argue that the U.S. governing structure is fascist. Roughly half of all U.S. military interventions occurred after the military-industrial complex was established. See Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, “Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019” (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 8 Aug 2022). After the end of the first Cold War, the U.S. government escalated its violence while other governments trended toward de-escalation. The U.S. meddled in foreign elections over 80 times during 1946-2000, not including support for coups/regime change, per University of Hong Kong researcher Dov Levin.

8. The Fourteenth Amendment (equal protection under the law), implemented after the U.S. Civil War, states that no person can be deprived of rights without due process. While the legislative intention for the amendment was for it to apply to formerly enslaved people, corporate lawyers and operatives expanded this application over time. In Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), the Supreme Court ruled that a corporation was an artificial person. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), railroad barons tried to use the amendment to pay less tax in California. Though the barons bribed a Supreme Court justice, Stephen J. Field, the court did not end up ruling that corporations were people, entitled to the same Fourteenth Amendment rights as flesh-and-blood people. The court clerk, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, wrote the headnote, a brief statement of the decision’s legal principles and/or the relevant facts. Headnotes are commentary on a case—commentary that have no legal standing. Davis’ headnote claimed that the chief justice of the Supreme Court had indeed stated that corporations were people. The Supreme Court thereafter pointed to the headnote in deliberations regarding corporate activity, effectively creating substantial though faulty legal precedent.

9. Lawrence Mishel, Elise Gould, Josh Bivens, “Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts” (Economic Policy Institute, 6 Jan 2015). For one major cost of living, of many, see Tracy Jan, “A minimum-wage worker can’t afford a 2-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S.” (WP, 13 Jun 2018). Median rent in the U.S. as of August 2022 is $2,000, per Chris Arnold, “Rents across U.S. rise above $2,000 a month for the first time ever” (NPR, 9 Jun 2022).

10. The U.S. Armed Forces and the corporations running U.S. military bases used open-air pits to burn trash, including appliances, batteries, fecal matter, used medical supplies, paint thinner, vehicle parts, and a variety of plastics. Jet fuel, itself a carcinogen, was often used to ignite the blazes. Over 230 U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq used burn pits before the Pentagon started limiting their use in 2009. U.S. military leadership dragged its feet, refusing to concede any correlation between burn pits and pulmonary and respiratory disease in troops and veterans. On 2 August 2022, the Senate passed the PACT Act, which removed the burden of proof from veterans seeking care related to burn-pit exposure by presuming a number of medical conditions are related to the exposure. The U.S. government has no plans to help Iraqis, Afghans, or “third country nationals” who were exposed to its burn pits.

11. Former CIA operations officer John Stockwell: “Essentially a conservative organization, the CIA maintains secret liaisons with local security services wherever it operates. Its stations are universally part of the official communities of the host countries. Case officers… are part of that elite. They become conditioned to the mentality of the authoritarian figures, the police chiefs, with whom they work and socialize, and eventually share their resentment of revolutionaries who threaten the status quo. They are ill at ease with democracies and popular movements—too fickle and hard to predict. Thus CIA case officers sympathized with the whites of South Africa, brushing aside evidence of oppression with shallow clichés…” Stockwell quoted in his book In Search of Enemies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 49.

12. Coast Guard Intelligence, DEA’s Office of National Security Intelligence, and DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis largely focus on borders, keeping some surplus workers out while monitoring the working class within. The Energy Department’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence protects the MIC’s primary weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weaponry. Having developed from the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services research department, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research produces information for U.S. diplomacy (which helps Corporate America through bullying and pressuring other countries), analyzes geographical and international boundary issues, and eyes public opinion in foreign countries. Large military-intelligence units (e.g., Defense Intelligence Agency, Sixteenth Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence) monitor the peoples of the world in the skies and on the open ocean. In addition, the Defense Intelligence Agency runs case officers (traditionally CIA’s domain) and military attachés, the Office of Naval Intelligence monitors global maritime trade, and the Sixteenth Air Force engages in some manipulation of the truth (“information warfare”). NSA’s peer, the Central Security Service, protects communications. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency maps the terrain using satellites whose launch the National Reconnaissance Office arranges. Space Force’s Delta 7 keeps an eye on satellites, friendly and enemy. The sky—highly classified satellite operations excluded from public knowledge—is the limit.

13. The Christian Right in the United States wants a Christian nation. Practitioners believe in a horrific end times wherein non-believers perish prior to Christ’s return. Their leadership has positioned secular institutions, from Planned Parenthood to the United Nations, as organized foes. Right-wing politicians who rose to authority during the war on terror promote absurdities and seize an electorate already riled up via Right media, including widespread radio broadcasting and creative social media, to posture as anti-establishment. The Christian Right is committed, coordinated, and bankrolled by key capitalists, including hedge-fund tycoons. Christian-Right politicians support the capitalists’ top priorities: continued implementation of neoliberal economic policies, including the corporatization of government function and negligible government regulation; the funneling of Federalist Society judges to the top courts; ongoing tax breaks and shelters; and anti-union activity of corporations. The Christian Right supports U.S. military and industry, as violence is the foundation of any fascist government. Many members of the Christian Right even occupy high rank in the U.S. military, as documented thoroughly by retired Air Force officer Michael Weinstein, leader of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. (The fascist state’s actions directly opposed Jesus’ teachings of tolerance, love of the poor, forgiveness.)