The fascist economist Antonio Salazar, the fascist dictator of Portugal, who rule his country from 1932 to 1968, has to be smiling wherever his dust has settled. The same goes for the economists Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto. (Pareto's curve has great currency among America's more conservative and right wing economists.)
The rise of corporatism, a building stone of fascism, is taking form in the US. Already, through think tanks and lobbies, funded by Corporate America, position papers and, yes even, legislation are drafted by corporate actors and passed on to the US Congress. Republicans are notorious for changing neither a jot nor a tiddle of legislation that their corporate handlers have given them for a white envelope of money.
As such, any pretense of democracy becomes a mockery. Finance capitalism has emerged relatively unscathed from the general world recession it created in 2008, thanks to the monies extracted from the middle classes, the working class, and the poor. And the laws are so skewed against them so that the super rich grow fatter on the benefits from tax breaks, which, in turn, the froth of their wealth is used to corrupt already corrupt politicians who will do their will.
No, the US has not entered a new age of 'robber barons', per se; it is sliding down the slipping road of corporatism, a fundamentalism element of Salazarian fascism.
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