Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges, a former New York Times reporter, in his book "American Fascism: The Christian Right and the War on America" argues that a home-grown fascism in the United States is destroying the very essence of democracy in America. Hedges' book paints an alarming picture of a country in despair, its people deprived of political and economic power to make democracy work.

As America prepares for a new presidential election, with declining numbers of people trusting the political system, Mr. Hedges says it is time for a painful reassessment of the ills at the heart of a country that is losing his hold on democracy and falling prey to the dangerous forces of atavistic religious fundamentalism on the social side and neo-conservative corporatism on the economic side. America's religious right, he contends, is a movement with many common elements of classical fascism: rampant nationalism, militarism, contempt for the poor and disdain for intellectual freedom. And all this against a backdrop of pervasive corporate power.

"The reason we are fighting this movement in the U.S. is because we live in a country where top 1 per cent control more than the bottom 90 per cent combined," Hedges said. As the war in Iraq shreds whatever credibility the Bush administration had after 9/11, massive sums are allocated to the military while ordinary taxpayers struggle for a living wage and the administration touts the "spread of democracy" abroad while eroding civil liberties at home, many Americans believe democracy has become a hollow word in America. "It is so expensive to run a presidential campaign that unless you are funded by corporate America you can forget it," he says.

And Hedges is not alone in pointing out how this has spread in America during the Bush presidency. Some liberal critics of the Bush administration argue that the growing militarisation of America is sowing the seeds of fascism, undermining the basic tenets of democracy.

As Bangladesh faces a crisis in holding free and fair election, it should learn from the voting frauds and hijacking of democracy by small powerful groups. Elections in America have become a joke because of voting frauds by partisan election officials and their corporate allies. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote in The Rolling Stone magazine last year: "American history is littered with vote fraud -- but rather than learning from our shameful past and cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the past two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that our votes are not accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box." This applies to Bangladesh as well.