Is Bob Gammage Damaged Goods?

I 've been watching the viral marketing campaign online for former Texas Supreme Court justice Bob Gammage's "campaign" for Texas Governor unfold over the past two weeks, and I must say it's been an interesting and yet obviously choreographed demonstration, and a lesson for anyone who wants to create buzz about a candidate "considering" a run for office. Apparently, it worked, because Gammage is to declare himself a candidate next week, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

(In fact, we're seeing the same thing also happen with rumors now online around two other possible Democratic candidates for Governor, former Texas House speaker Pete Laney and Houston mayor Bill White, but that's fodder for a post I'll make should either or both decide to crowd into the water.)

The questions I pose below have been turning over in my mind since I did some Googling on Gammage -- his long experience in Texas politics predates my own quite short experience as an activist, so I went looking for some information in the public domain that might tell me what he's been up to since he retired from the Texas Supreme Court in 1995.

Not a lot, it appears, beyond earning a comfortable living as an attorney and working in the Wesley Clark campaign in 2004.

First of all, some self-disclosure is in order. It ought to be no secret that I'm an avid supporter of Chris Bell. Bell was my representative when he served in Congress; he's been a friend of my family's for quite some time, and I like him a lot personally. So there will be some who are going to carp about my bias, and I'll admit it straight up front so there's no misunderstanding. I'm on record as saying that a contested primary is not a bad thing. And so it ought be just as clear that my enthusiasm for Bell has nothing to do with the questions that surround Bob Gammage's departure from public service ten years ago, his reasons for doing so, and his political activism since that time. These are matters Gammage is simply going to have to clear up in order to run a successful campaign.

I hereby invite him to do so, here or elsewhere online (or in the MSM, if he so chooses).

Let me begin with the circumstances surrounding Gammage's departure from the Supreme Court in August, 1995:

At the time he resigned -- almost a year and a half prior to the expiration of his term on the Court -- Gammage stated that he intended to go to work with former Texas attorney general, judge, and gubernatorial candidate John Hill, who had announced plans to reform the judicial system in Texas. But Gammage did not do that; instead he accepted a position in then-Land Commissioner Garry Mauro's office.

This prompts two questions:

-- why did Gammage resign so early? He created a vacancy for Bush to appoint James Baker -- no relation to the former G. H.W. Bush Secretary of State -- and Baker was able to run as an incumbent, winning the 1996 election, strengthening the assimilation of increasingly harder-right-wing radicals to the Court, and paving the way for the GOP sweeps from that time up to the present.

-- why did Gammage say he would do one thing, but then do another? Was the pay in Mauro's office so great, or the calling greater than that of Hill's judicial reform efforts? Wouldn't a retiring Supreme Court Justice have better prospects than this?

Now as far as I can tell, Bob Gammage left Austin in 1996 and relocated from Houston -- where he had served in the US Congress before his constituents selected Mike Andrews instead to represent them -- to Arlington, began a law practice in Llano, and spent nearly a decade out of the political limelight ... until he got heavily involved in Clark's presidential campaign in 2004.

(More disclosure: I also worked on Clark's campaign, attending Meetups and writing letters to New Hampshireites and Virginians and making phone calls as well to voters in those states. I did not meet Gammage, or even hear of his name during that time. And I am sure he did not hear of mine. I daresay he has little to no idea who I am today).

According to people who would know, Bob had promised his wife Linda a quieter, more comfortable life after his years in governmental service, something to which they were both certainly entitled.

But according to other people who would know, Gammage had some murky implication in the scandal of the time: the tobacco-litigation kickbacks that eventually ensnared attorney general Dan Morales, forcing his resignation from office and resulting in his conviction and prison sentence (which as of this post Morales is still serving):

But if he enters the race, (Gammage) also may have to answer campaign questions about his own unwitting role in a major Democratic scandal, former Attorney General Dan Morales' attempt to obtain millions of dollars in fraudulent legal fees for a friend in Texas' anti-tobacco lawsuit.

Morales is about halfway through a four-year federal prison sentence stemming from the case, and his friend, Marc Murr, was sentenced to six months in federal prison. Both pleaded guilty in 2003 to federal mail fraud charges.

Gammage was one of three state arbitrators who recommended in 1998 that Murr, then an attorney, be paid $260 million for purported work that other lawyers in the tobacco suit said he never performed.

The arbitrators were selected by Morales and Murr after Morales had obtained a $17.3 billion settlement of a suit against tobacco companies over health care costs associated with smoking.

A national arbitration panel overturned most of the state award and gave Murr $1 million, which he later relinquished after Morales' successor, Attorney General John Cornyn, challenged the award in court.

Five other law firms hired by Morales to try the case shared in $3.3 billion in legal fees awarded by the federal arbitrators. The fees are being paid in installments by cigarette makers.

Gammage said Thursday that he and the other two state arbitrators "dealt with the evidence that was before us."

"There was a very detailed account of what he (Morales) said Murr had done," Gammage recalled.

No one, he said, presented evidence against the fees.

He also said the arbitration process had been approved by the federal judge presiding over the tobacco case and the panel's recommended award was conditioned on the judge's approval.

I'd simply like a bit more detailed explanation than so far has been made regarding this from Gammage.

And I make my request so that the voters of theTexas Democratic Party can select a candidate for Governor that has absolutely none of the same stench of corruption that the Republicans thoroughly reek of.

What say you, Mr. Gammage?

Update: Apparently Bob's been thinking about running for quite bit longer than the last couple of weeks.

ZL0b-ing it yesterday

That's the name of the nasty virus I picked up and dealt with all of yesterday. It's still got one last annoying little thing popping up, and it's dug its fingernails into the registry, but I will shortly rip it out by the roots.

On Saturday we spent the day in Galveston at Dickens on the Strand, and Sunday we attended Jim Henley's campaign kickoff.

So that's why you haven't seen me around here for awhile.

A few things happened while I was away...

Tom DeLay got bad news on three fronts: he'll go to trial on money-laundering charges after the holidays, the House Republicans are desperate to ditch him, and he polls well behind an unnamed 'Democrat' in his district. (Pssst, Gallup: several of us in Texas know the name of the Democrat.) La Cucaracha Grande still hasn't awakened and smelled the coffee, though, because he was all smiles at a fundraiser for his lawyers last night. The protestors outnumbered the donors again; about 300 to 100. I think they call that a 'slam dunk'...

It now appears as if a handful of Democrats -- from Bob Gammage to Pete Laney to Tony Sanchez to Bill White -- are grinding their rumor mills in an effort to build support for a run for Governor. None of them seem to have noticed that there are other statewide offices with no candidates. And the Houston Chronicle still may not be aware that David Van Os has been running for Attorney General for months now. (I will have a post regarding Gammage in the next day or two regarding his online viral campaign, and a handful of unanswered and rather unsettling questions.)

And the network of Lone Star Lefty bloggers' Texan of the Year campaign finally made the MSM.

I'll try to get caught up later.

GOP Goobers finally fire their muskets

We've all been waiting for the eye-scratching and hair-pulling to commence in the Republican gubernatorial primary. It's finally time to microwave Orville Redenbacher:

Gov. Rick Perry's campaign Friday accused Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, his Republican primary rival, of using her state office equipment to produce a campaign news release.

That prompted Strayhorn's camp to fire back and accuse a Perry aide of acting as a political operative even when he was working in the governor's press office at the state Capitol.

"Yes you did!" "No I didn't, but you did!" "Neener, neener!"

Another stimulating debate between the GOP leaders of the Great State of Texas on the difficult issues facing us. Repeat after me: "Adios, MoFos".

Texas redistricting was illegal -- but the GOP did it anyway

Others have this news from overnight, so I'll be brief with the snips and the linkage. From the WaPo:

Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.

The memo, unanimously endorsed by six lawyers and two analysts in the department's voting section, said the redistricting plan illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power in two congressional districts. It also said the plan eliminated several other districts in which minorities had a substantial, though not necessarily decisive, influence in elections.

...

One of two DeLay aides also under indictment in the case, James W. Ellis, is cited in the Justice Department memo as pushing for the plan despite the risk that it would not receive "pre-clearance," or approval, from the department. Ellis and other DeLay aides successfully forced the adoption of their plan over two other versions passed by Texas legislators that would not have raised as many concerns about voting rights discrimination, the memo said.

... the Justice Department's approval of the redistricting plan, signed by Sheldon T. Bradshaw, principal deputy assistant attorney general, was valuable to Texas officials when they defended it in court. He called the internal Justice Department memo, which did not come out during the court case, "yet another indictment of Tom DeLay, because this memo shows conclusively that the map he produced violated the law."

...

Jerry Strickland, a spokesman for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, said he did not have any immediate comment.

You can read the 73-page memo here (.pdf file).

So, two things:

First, it's clear once again that Nothing Gets In Tom DeLay's Way. Not the law, not the Justice Department, not the will of the people, nothing.

He's proven -- once again -- that he's the one at the heart of the Republican Mafia running Texas and the nation. Not the brains (that's Rove and Cheney) but the muscle. DeLay is the capo who breaks the kneecaps and collects the insurance, which he then doles out to his little henchmen all over the country. DeLay is both good earner and enforcer.

A reminder: Big Time Dick will be in Houston next Monday to keep the Republicans' Thing going -- he's coming to help The Hammer raise money for the brigades of lawyers working nights to keep his sorry ass out of jail. With them wll appear the Governor of Texas, Rick "Adios MoFo" Perry, and the junior Senator from Texas, John "I Love Torturing Box Turtles" Cornyn.

A Corruption Superfecta.

It may yet be that the good people of the 22nd District will get to deliver the message the Sugar Land Bugman has been ignoring for years now, or maybe the law will eventually catch up to him, whether that is Ronnie Earle or the Justice Department attorneys who will prosecute the charges resulting from the misdeeds of Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon. But like Al Capone, Tom DeLay ain't goin' to the end of the block without a fight.

Second, DeLay and his illegal cash corrupt everyone they touch. Why the Attorney General of Texas would roll over for Tom DeLay in defiance of the the Department of Justice makes him a stooge of the first rank. The only reason these nonbinding-but-heavily-weighted memos are issued is to avoid lengthy and expensive (to the taxpayers) court battles.

The law said no, and the GOP political hacks said screw the law, we're doing it anyway. Let them try to stop us.

Well guess what, thugs? The people are going to stop you. One way or another, we're taking you down.

Lefty blogs select Republican as Texan of the Year

So we had this contest, if you recall...

And the winner is a Republican.

And not Tom DeLay, or Tom Craddick, or Governor MoFo or either of the two idiots in the US Senate.

We passed over Texans who made big news in a good way, such as Ronnie Earle and Bill White. We even skipped the Kinkster (my humble O is that he hasn't made any news yet).

Rep. Carter Casteel of New Braunfels is the recipient of the first annual Texan of the Year.

Now to be clear, Casteel was about my seventh out of a list of nine. I actually never heard the name until we ran this contest. And you may be saying the same thing to yourself at this moment. So by way of introduction, here's a bit from the press release:

Casteel was selected, in part, for her outstanding courage and hard work during the legislative session to support public education. Representative Casteel, a Republican, was overwhelmingly selected by a group of ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ bloggers in Texas for her ability to break ranks with Republican leadership that was widely seen to ignore the pressing issue of school finance. “We believe, as a group, that Representative Casteel embodies the spirit of statesmanship and reminds all of us what a true leader does to stand up for Texas. We’re pleased and encouraged by her ability to work with leadership from both sides of the aisle for the common good,” says Charlie from Pinkdome.com.

Rep. Casteel answered a few questions posed by us, also:

========================================

Do you expect a challenger in the primary (from either party)?

I always run a campaign like I’ve got a challenger. I’ve not heard of one so far.

What do you think of your party's attempts at targeting those that voted for the Hochberg amendment?

I don’t think they are being targeted by the leadership.

What do you think of the '65% rule'?

That’s fine. That’s an admirable goal. Depending on how you count it. But here’s the question: what is the classroom? Are you talking about the teacher, the aide, the nurse, the librarian, the counselor? You have to include some of the support for the teacher so the kid is in the classroom in the first place.

How does one balance voting one's district, one's party, and one's personal feelings when those three points are not all in line on a single issue?

I’ve got a brain and a background so I know that’s important to use. I’m also in a district I’ve lived in for thirty-something years. I have a fair understanding of my district, but it is critical that I communicate with my district. It is a struggle because you are going to vote your district and your conscience and every two years you have to answer to them. I’m comfortable with my party platform.

What concerns me is how public education became a liberal issue! That’s a conservative value.

I balance all those things and make my decision. It can offend people, but I can stand by my decisions. Don’t forget, I listen to the debate.

What do you think of the recent (Texas) Supreme Court ruling (on the funding of Texas public education)?

I think adequacy is still on the table and will come up in the next special session.

What would you like to see the Lege do with school finance reform?

Competitive teacher pay and health care benefits. I don’t think it’s fair to ask our teachers to help shape the future of Texas and not compensate them in a fair way.

What do you think will actually happen with school finance reform?

I think everything is on the table. I’ve met with John Sharp and I believe we are all eager to see solutions that are fair from district to district. I think there is a growth and interest among the people of Texas that are paying attention and I think that is a good thing. People are concerned
about our lack of progress and stepping up to the plate to get in front of the right people.

What do you think about educators lobbying the Legislature?

How in the world can they communicate with the legislature without coming up there and talk to (us). If you want to call it lobbying, fine. But people go on their own time and write letters. People have made the same complaints against everybody that comes up to the legislature.

That being said, I’d rather see my tax dollars being used to educate children. If that’s not happening, then I want my tax dollars to communicate with the legislature on behalf of what’s not happening. I don’t know what the rule is, but we’ll see if a rule is going to be proposed. How is it being done? Can we invite the education community to the legislature in a different way? They’ve been shut out so maybe a lobbyist is the only way to get in the door.

============================

Jack over at The People's Republic of Seabrook appears to have weighed in first with the news, followed closely by the Pink Lady.

Thanks for sponsoring the contest goes to PinkDome.

Update (today): An excerpt from Eye on Williamson County's post:

Her decision to stand up to Speaker Craddick, wing-nut money changer Dr. James Leininger, and the many Republican voucher sheep - in order to save what's left of our public schools so there is still a chance they can become what they should be - was an extraordinary act of courage, dignity, justice and just plain doing the right thing.

And from Hope at The Appalachia Alumni Association:

Perhaps this year's Texan of the Year Award should be renamed the Bill Ratliff Memorial Award For Not Being A Slave To Power Politics.

Update #2 (also today): Kuffner notes Casteel's comment...

What concerns me is how public education became a liberal issue! That's a conservative value.

And responds:

To me, public education isn't a conservative value any more than it's a liberal value. It is, or at least I hope it is, a universal value. It's a recognition by society that everyone benefits when knowledge and learning are accessible to all. We can argue about how best to implement that, and frankly I think we're best off when we have many perspectives in that argument, but we all need to agree that we have to implement it somehow before that argument can be a productive one. With people like Rep. Casteel in Austin, I feel like that's possible.

And By the Bayou points out that, unlike the other nominees, Casteel had significant impact for better and for worse:

Representative Casteel certainly deserves credit for her work on education. However, she was part of something else that had a big impact on Texas this year, and it wasn't something good: she was a co-author of HJR 6, which put the now-passed anti-marriage amendment on the ballot in November.

On the other hand, though, she also voted against legislation that would have banned gay people from being foster parents. That was a good vote, and courageous for a Republican. ...

While many of the other final nominees had an impact on Texas in one area or another, Ms. Casteel managed to be influential in two areas. First, she courageously broke with her party's leadership to help protect public education in Texas. She has demonstrated bipartisanship in an increasingly partisan legislature, and that's to be commended.

But second, she not-so-courageously helped write discrimination into the state constitution. The impact of that one will be felt longer, and while it qualifies her as a person of importance this year, it's nothing to be proud of.

Upcoming Texas Democratic Candidate Events

Air America Radio's Al Franken takes his show on the road to Dallas this Friday, December 2 at the Hard Rock Cafe (2601 McKinney, 75204 for those of you in Big D). Guests include Texas Attorney General candidate David Van Os, US Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, and columnist Molly Ivins.

(Since Clear Channel hasn't yet been convinced to bring AAR to Houston, you can stream the broadcast live through your computer by clicking on the link above. David's interview with Al is scheduled to air at just after noon -- but since it's live radio that could change.)

David's Whistlestop Campaign Kickoff party is Saturday, December 3, at Austin's Barr Mansion. Jim Hightower is featured speaker. Music by Tres Lunas. Tickets are $50 and include a dinner buffet.

Barbara Radnofsky will file for election and hold a press conference on Monday, December 5 at the Democratic Party offices, 707 Rio Grande, in Austin at 2 p.m., where she will deliver her proposals for Texans' health care, education, and veterans' affairs. She'll also outline the Top Ten Cynical Anti-Texas positions her opponent, Kay Bailey Perjury Technicality Hutchison, has taken during the past year.

And Chris Bell will be appearing at the Galveston County Central Labor Council's Holiday Banquet on Tuesday December 6, at Fisherman's Wharf restaurant in the Strand, Galveston. The event starts with a social hour at 6 p.m., and the dinner program begins at 7. Congressional candidates Nick Lampson and Shane Sklar will also be speaking at the event.

Lurching toward theocratic fascism

Long before Dr. James Dobson forced Harriet Miers to withdraw from consideration for the Supreme Court, and long before Dick Cheney and the Big Oil kingpins had the minutes from their meetings sealed by the USSC after Cheney and Scalia went duck-hunting in Louisiana, I felt that the United States was heading down this ominous path. Two friends recently forwarded me some articles that prompt me to cobble together this post. Two excerpts follow, the first from Paul Bigioni:

=========================

Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: The vast bulk of legislative activity favours the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and U.S. governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the past 25 years.

Digging deeper into 20th century history, one finds the exaltation of big business at the expense of the citizen was a central characteristic of government policy in Germany and Italy in the years before those countries were chewed to bits and spat out by fascism. Fascist dictatorships were borne to power in each of these countries by big business, and they served the interests of big business with remarkable ferocity.

These facts have been lost to the popular consciousness in North America. Fascism could therefore return to us, and we will not even recognize it. Indeed, Huey Long, one of America's most brilliant and most corrupt politicians, was once asked if America would ever see fascism. "Yes," he replied, "but we will call it anti-fascism."

... Before the rise of fascism, Germany and Italy were, on paper, liberal democracies. Fascism did not swoop down on these nations as if from another planet. To the contrary, fascist dictatorship was the result of political and economic changes these nations underwent while they were still democratic. In both these countries, economic power became so utterly concentrated that the bulk of all economic activity fell under the control of a handful of men. Economic power, when sufficiently vast, becomes by its very nature political power. The political power of big business supported fascism in Italy and Germany.

Business tightened its grip on the state in both Italy and Germany by means of intricate webs of cartels and business associations. ... This was an era eerily like our own, insofar as economists and businessmen constantly clamoured for self-regulation in business. By the mid 1920s, however, self-regulation had become self-imposed regimentation. By means of monopoly and cartel, the businessmen had wrought for themselves a "command and control" economy that replaced the free market. The business associations of Italy and Germany at this time are perhaps history's most perfect illustration of Adam Smith's famous dictum: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

How could the German government not be influenced by Fritz Thyssen, the man who controlled most of Germany's coal production? How could it ignore the demands of the great I.G. Farben industrial trust, controlling as it did most of that nation's chemical production? Indeed, the German nation was bent to the will of these powerful industrial interests. Hitler attended to the reduction of taxes applicable to large businesses while simultaneously increasing the same taxes as they related to small business. Previous decrees establishing price ceilings were repealed such that the cost of living for the average family was increased. Hitler's economic policies hastened the destruction of Germany's middle class by decimating small business.

Ironically, Hitler pandered to the middle class, and they provided some of his most enthusiastically violent supporters. The fact that he did this while simultaneously destroying them was a terrible achievement of Nazi propaganda.

Hitler also destroyed organized labour by making strikes illegal. Notwithstanding the socialist terms in which he appealed to the masses, Hitler's labour policy was the dream come true of the industrial cartels that supported him. Nazi law gave total control over wages and working conditions to the employer.

...

The same economic reality existed in Italy between the two world wars. In that country, nearly all industrial activity was owned or controlled by a few corporate giants, Fiat and the Ansaldo shipping concern being the chief examples ... As a young man, Mussolini had been a strident socialist, and he, like Hitler, used socialist language to lure the people to fascism. Mussolini spoke of a "corporate" society wherein the energy of the people would not be wasted on class struggle. The entire economy was to be divided into industry specific corporazioni, bodies composed of both labour and management representatives. The corporazioni would resolve all labour/management disputes; if they failed to do so, the fascist state would intervene.

Unfortunately, as in Germany, there laid at the heart of this plan a swindle. The corporazioni, to the extent that they were actually put in place, were controlled by the employers. Together with Mussolini's ban on strikes, these measures reduced the Italian labourer to the status of peasant.

Mussolini, the one-time socialist, went on to abolish the inheritance tax, a measure that favoured the wealthy. He decreed a series of massive subsidies to Italy's largest industrial businesses and repeatedly ordered wage reductions. Italy's poor were forced to subsidize the wealthy. In real terms, wages and living standards for the average Italian dropped precipitously under fascism.

Even this brief historical sketch shows how fascism did the bidding of big business. The fact that Hitler called his party the "National Socialist Party" did not change the reactionary nature of his policies. The connection between the fascist dictatorships and monopoly capital was obvious to the U.S. Department of Justice in 1939. As of 2005, however, it is all but forgotten.

...

It might be argued that North America's democratic political systems are so entrenched that we needn't fear fascism's return. The democracies of Italy and Germany in the 1920s were in many respects fledgling and weak. Our systems will surely react at the first whiff of dictatorship.

Or will they? This argument denies the reality that the fascist dictatorships were preceded by years of reactionary politics, the kind of politics that are playing out today. Further, it is based on the conceit that whatever our own governments do is democracy. ... In the U.S., millions still question the legality of the sitting president's first election victory, and the power to declare war has effectively become his personal prerogative. Assuming that we have enough democracy to protect us is exactly the kind of complacency that allows our systems to be quietly and slowly perverted. On paper, Italy and Germany had constitutional, democratic systems. What they lacked was the eternal vigilance necessary to sustain them. That vigilance is also lacking today.

====================

And from Bill Wheeler, in an e-mail to me:

====================

The first of the Dixiecrats to leave the Democratic Party in 1948 took place when the Democrats would not remove a plank in the platform calling for an integrated military. Jesse Helms formed the Dixiecrat Party and ran for President that year. He later moved on to the Republican Party who accepted him and all others of his ilk with open arms.

In the South they were called the ‘yellow dog’ Democrats because it was said that if they ran an old yellow dog against any Republican, they would still vote for the dog. Now they’re Republicans. Mostly made up of neo-Nazi, KKK, white supremacists, paramilitary and conservative religious fanatics, they joined the far right conservative, John Birch Sociey wing of the Republican Party. Their movement grew slowly in the fifties, gained speed in the 60’s and 70’s. At best, they could be described as social conservatives or, in my view, social misfits.

They became the ‘swing vote’ that started changing the face of Congress and the national political scene. This is when the likes of Trent Lott and Phil Gramm went ‘over’. The old conservative social Democrats would accept the traditional Republican adherence to Big Business; in return, the Republicans would accept them as the petty bourgeoisie with their social hatreds.

I explain this political movement not as a long journey from the politically extreme left to the extreme right; but as one short step. How? The political dichotomies, in my view, form a continuum not along a straight line left and right but rather as a clock face, where moderates or centrists are located at 6:00 and the extreme right and left wings converge at 12:00. With this in mind, it is easy to see that it is but a small step from totalitarian left to totalitarian right. There is not much difference in these extremes except their social standings.

Leon Trotsky called both of these enigmas of mankind ‘fascist’. The right wing corporate conservative unites with the petty bourgeoisie left wing social (usually religious) conservatives. He called left wingers “social democrats” and “social fascists”.

Once the petty bourgeoisie were compelled to change course, they were employed to fight the street battles, to get bloody, and take the risks. This is just what the Republican Party needed, an Army – not in this case to fight a war but to win the battle at the polls.

Trotsky wrote:

“the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role -- but it means first of all for the most part that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism....”

Trotsky further wrote:

“After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives.”

And finally:

“And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive, administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed."

======================================

Comments?