The American Spectator

There is a whiff of Fascism emanating from the Obama White House.

Reports say that the head of GM is quitting under duress from the Obama administration: 

General Motors chairman and chief executive G. Richard Wagoner is resigning at the request of the White House, clearing the way for the Obama administration to offer the company more federal aid.

On Monday, President Obama is expected to unveil his plan to prop up General Motors and Chrysler, offering them more money if the companies agree to shrink and refocus their businesses.

Wagoner’s resignation was one of the White House conditions for more federal aid. “He agreed and will do that,” a senior administration official said Sunday evening.

Wagoner, 56, joined the company in 1977 and has been chairman and chief executive since 2003. […]

Although there have been some incidents of government exercising minor control over industry during wartime, this aggressive assault on American capitalism is unprecedented and should give all Americans who care about freedom pause.

Strict government control over businesses is the essence of Fascism, or more precisely, Mussolini-style corporatism. As Mussolini said, “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Corporatism boils down to this: government tells industry (and labor) what to do and they do it for the supposed good of the country.

For the president of the United States to be able to, effectively, fire the head of a major corporation is not a road America has ever headed down before.

ADDENDUM the next day: A commenter below brings up the issue of AIG. This is a fair point to raise. I regret for several months last year my research was focused on ACORN, the Community Reinvestment Act, Goldman Sachs, and a few other topics.
Preoccupied, I failed to comment on the reported firing of AIG’s Robert Willumstad by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. But I began railing against the Bush administration’s corporatist policies long ago, before I became a blogger here at The American Spectator. That said, the Obama administration has done much more to move America toward corporatism than Bush ever did. Bush began driving America down the road to Fascism, but Obama, with the Wagoner purge and other events, put the pedal to the metal. America is not there yet but it is progressing there.