Marie Antoinette, meet Ronald McDonald.
A lot of people are angry about McDonald’s new financial advice website for employees, an ill-conceived project which drips with “let them eat cake” insouciance. “Every dollar makes a difference,” McDonald’s lectures its struggling and often impoverished workers.
But it’s time to ditch the resentment and offer McDonald’s a word of thanks. It has just performed an invaluable service for campaigns like Raise the Minimum Wage....The author explains how mega-corporations like McDonald's rely on state welfare programs to sustain their employees. Therefore, government welfare programs are used as subsidies for huge profit-making enterprises. This phenomenon is another symptom of the government takeover by corporations which has various names such as corporatocracy, plutocracy, or even fascism--if you add in a centralized authoritarian police state.
Of course, the word "fascism" has been reduced to merely a pejorative curse word by bourgeois writers and propagandists to divert attention away from the natural tendencies of capitalist rule. If one eliminates various stylistic differences of regimes characterized as "fascist" in various historical periods and locations, you will always find a common core feature: the direct corporate-capitalist control of government that uses police state methods combined with an elaborate propaganda apparatus to support their class interests. Hence, the term characterizes a state where capitalist rule is stripped of its "democratic" and "rule of law" facades, where the capitalist ruling class has its way through the application of various coercive methods that includes the use of invasive surveillance, prisons (concentration camps), and police intimidation. It's obvious that capitalist propagandists have worked overtime since WWII to make the term meaningless because of the natural and historical relationship that fascism has to their class rule.