Robert Scheer, formerly of the LA Times (heh), remembers that by the standards of his own intellectual tradition, what we are seeing is a kind of corporatism and corporatism is the economic doctrine of you-know-what:
I don’t think the idea of nationalizing, as it’s now being called — which means bailing out these banks, setting them straight, then letting them go private again, which is the model that everybody is using, and the people who get screwed are the people whose retirement funds had common or preferred shares and they get wiped out, and these bankers come out richer than ever at the other end — that’s not a leftist idea and it’s not socialism. This is what we used to, in Comparative Economic Systems, call fascism. It’s putting government at the service of the big financial interests. That’s what happened in Italy, that’s what happened in Germany, that’s what happened in Japan.