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Published on Saturday, January 22, 2005 by CommonDreams.Org
Kennedy: Fascist America
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wants to run for Attorney General of New
York
State.
He might announce his candidacy within the next two weeks.
He's the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the former Attorney General under
his
brother, John F. Kennedy.
In 2001, President Bush named the Justice Department building after RFK.
The young Kennedy attended the ceremony.
We asked him what he thought of President Bush naming the building after
his dad.
He said he wouldn't comment on the record.
But he did call President Bush "the most corrupt and immoral President
that we have had in American history."
Not that he was enamored with Senator John Kerry.
Early in the campaign, Kennedy endorsed Senator John Kerry for
President, but last month he expressed disappointment in Kerry's
campaign and in the Democratic Party.
"The Republicans are 95 percent corrupt and the Democrats are 75 percent
corrupt," Kennedy. "They are accepting money from the same corporations.
And of course, that is going to corrupt you."
He has spent the last 18 years as a sort of private attorney general
--
suing polluters to clean up the Hudson River.
Kennedy says that in the late 1960s, the Hudson River was "a national
joke."
"It was dead water for 20-mile stretches north of New York City and
south of Albany. It caught fire. It changed colors," he said. "Today,
it
is the richest water body in the North Atlantic. It produces more pounds
of fish per acre and more biomass per gallon than any other waterway
in
the Atlantic north of the equator. It is the last major river system
left in the North Atlantic, on both sides, that still has strong
spawning stocks of all of its historical species of migratory fish."
He is seeking to close down the Indian Point nuclear power plant 22
miles north of New York City.
"After Chernobyl, 1,000 miles around the plant were uninhabitable. One
hundred miles around the plant are permanently uninhabitable," he said.
"One hundred miles around Indian Point would be all of New York City.
So, imagine a world without New York City. Well, the terrorists already
have. According to the 9/11 Commission, Mohammed Atta cased Indian
Point
before deciding to bomb the World Trade Center. But he believed,
erroneously as it turned out, that the plant must be so heavily guarded,
that it would be impossible to crash an airliner into it."
Kennedy charges that his appearance on MSNBC's Charles Grodin show in
November 1996 got Grodin fired.
Kennedy was invited on the show to talk about his book and group by
the
same name -- Riverkeepers.
On the show, Kennedy ripped into GE, an owner of the network, for
polluting the Hudson with PCBs.
On the show, Kennedy claimed that "every woman between Oswego and Albany
has elevated levels of PCBs in her milk because of GE."
Grodin was soon thereafter fired.
Kennedy wrote a book last year that he hoped would change the direction
of the country.
It didn't.
But it's a great book, nonetheless.
It's called Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and his Corporate
Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
(HarperCollins, 2004).
For the past couple of years, he's been giving 40 or so speeches a year,
mostly in the red zone, mostly to conservative groups.
He speaks about the corporate attack on the country.
"There is no difference between the reaction I get from Republicans
and
Democrats, because Americans share the same values," Kennedy told us.
"If you talk about these issues in terms of our national values,
everybody understands it."
In the book, Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and that
the Bush White House has learned key lessons from the Nazis.
"While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is
the control of government by business," he writes. "My American Heritage
Dictionary defines fascism as 'a system of government that exercises
a
dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of
state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism.'
Sound familiar?"
He quotes Hitler's propaganda chief Herman Goerring: "It is always
simply a matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy,
or
a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That
is
easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and
denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger. It works the same in any country."
Kennedy then adds: "The White House has clearly grasped the lesson."
Kennedy also quotes Benito Mussolini's insight that "fascism should
more
appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state
and corporate power."
"The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power," Kennedy
told us. "There is vogue in the White House to talk about the threat
of
big government. But since the beginning of our national history, our
most visionary political leaders have warned the American public against
the domination of government by corporate power. That warning is missing
in the national debate right now. Because so much corporate money is
going into politics, the Democratic Party itself has dropped the ball.
They just quash discussion about the corrosive impact of excessive
corporate power on American democracy."
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