GOP1
see tag and GOP2 for newer content
GOP is catchall term for conservative, but most content here does pertain to party
see 2 santas
see also science suppression for GOP war on science
capt 917
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no lnx
Republicans and the biggest political con of the last century
Thom Hartmann May 24, 2025
Neal deGrasse Tyson makes a very relevant point this week:
“If a foreign adversary snuck into our Federal budget and cut science research and education the way we’re cutting it ourselves — strategically undermining America’s long-term health, wealth, and security — we would likely consider it an act of war.”
Donald Trump’s administration just said you can’t get the Covid vaccine unless you’re over 65 or sick, setting up America for more death and disease. As Noah Berlatsky notes in his great Substack newsletter:
“This is the latest effort by Trump to try to kick start a major US pandemic and degrade the health and welfare of the country. Trump as also rolled back food testing, including testing for bacteria in infant formula. He’s made major cuts at the FAA, leading to fears for airline safety—and a number of dramatic airline safety failures already may be related to the destruction of capacity. Cuts at the NOAA may diminish the ability to warn about dangerous weather events. The Republican proposals for Medicaid cuts are likely to lead to tens of thousands of deaths. And of course Trump’s senseless tariffs are increasing inflation, destroying jobs, and could still easily end us in a recession.“
But why? What the hell is going on here?
Almost two-thirds of us Americans can’t afford the basic necessities of life, according to a new report from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) reported by CBS News. They point out that if unemployment numbers included the underemployed and those stuck in “poverty-wage jobs,” it would be around 24%, not the 4.2% recently reported, leading to an acknowledgement of a widespread misery that’s largely hidden by the way we currently calculate unemployment.
Income for the bottom 60% of Americans, for example, actually declined by 4% in the years 2001 to 2023 while costs — particularly for healthcare, housing, food, and education (college tuition, for example, is up 122% since 2001) — have exploded.
Before the pandemic, half of all homes on the market were affordable to a family earning $75,000 a year; today it’s only one out of five houses that such a family could afford to purchase.
The initial result of this post-Reagan Revolution economy was to kneecap the middle class and working class; now Republicans are using the same strategy they employed to destroy our middle class to dismantle our nation’s government and its core functions to leave us vulnerable to the predation of foreign nations, vulture capitalists, and the morbidly rich.
And nobody’s sure why.
The history of how we got here is shocking. And the place it’s taking us — gutting government functions while handing our role in the world over to China and Russia — is downright scandalous.
At first, it was simply a political strategy to claim the mantle of Santa Claus from the Democrats by “gifting” America with tax breaks. Then it became a program to force Dems to kill off their own social programs by driving up the national debt. And now it’s being used to disassemble the American government itself, abandoning what’s left of the middle class while handing America’s dominant role in the world to China and Russia.
You could call it treason, except that it’s become so normalized and institutionalized that most Americans wouldn’t even understand the reason for the label.
Republican policy weirdness that brought us to this moment began around the national debt in 1981.
The U.S. was significantly in debt following our Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Following the philosophy that a large national debt should only exist during a time of national emergency, in each case, after the end of each war, we began a serious effort to pay down that debt.
Andrew Jackson finished paying off the entire debt from the Revolutionary War in the 1830s. We’d largely paid off the debt from the Civil War by the end of the 19th century, and, as the Treasury Department notes on its debt history site, our “government ended the century with its finances in very good order.”
We paid the national debt for WWI down to a mere $17 billion by the time the Republican Great Depression hit, but between the cost of the New Deal and World War II, we entered the post-WWII era in 1946 with a debt equal to 106% of GDP, a ratio we hit again in 2015.
Republicans and Democrats quickly united around the idea of paying off our national debt in the post-war years, driving it down to a mere $800 billion ($0.8 trillion) between 1945 and 1981 when Reagan came into office.
And then, following Jude Wanniski’s “Two Santas” plan, the GOP embarked on an experiment that had never been intentionally tried in the U.S. or any other developed country in world history: drive up the national debt as high as possible with massive tax breaks for the very richest among us.
Reagan did this for two reasons:
— First, deficit spending with trillions in borrowed money (he ran the debt up to $2.4 trillion in a mere 8 years) stimulates the economy, so people thought Reagan had produced good times. (Give me a $2 trillion credit card, and I’ll show you what it looks like to live large, too!)
— Second, the rising debt gave Republicans the perfect excuse to follow Wanniski’s advice to force the Democrats to “shoot their Santa [of programs like Social Security and Medicaid] in the face.” Whenever a Republican is in the White House, Wanniski argued, Republicans should run up the debt as hard and fast as possible, so when a Democrat is in the White House they can squeal about “the debt our children will inherit! Oh, the humanity!”
The GOP has stuck to this strategy for 44 years now, running up $36 trillion in debt (and our entire Gross Domestic Product was a mere $27.7 trillion last year) and now, finally, we’ve reached the point where this unsustainable debt is not only costing us a trillion dollars a year in debt service (interest payments) but has led to a downgrade of our nation’s credit score.
At first, the main effect of the Two Santas strategy was merely to make the morbidly rich among us fabulously richer, while extracting much of that wealth from the homes, retirement plans, and savings of the middle class. It was, quite simply, a planned and successful transfer of roughly $50 trillion into the money bins of the rich, almost all of it coming out of the hides and lives of the rest of us.
When Reagan came into office in 1981, about two-thirds of Americans were solidly middle class with a single paycheck being able to buy a home, a car, raise a family, put the kids through school, and provide for a decent retirement.
Today, that same standard of living requires a bit more than two full-time jobs, and only about 47% of us are in the middle class (with two wage earners instead of just one in 1981).
“‘The middle class has been declining — we just haven't recognized it fully,’ LISEP Chairman Gene Ludwig told CBS MoneyWatch. ‘It’s really dangerous because it’s the kind of thing that leads to social unrest, and it’s not fair. The American dream is not that it’s given to you — it’s that if you work hard, you have a chance to get ahead and achieve the things in life that you want to achieve. It’s not living in a tent, not having to steal.”
But now Trump, Musk, Vance, and congressional Republicans — having first crushed the American middle class — are doing everything they can to destroy America’s preeminent position in the world along with our social safety net.
— Instead of investing in education and science, they’re making it harder for students to get an education.
— Instead of promoting democracy around the world, they’re embracing murderous dictators while broadcasting rightwing neofascist propaganda on Voice of America.
— Instead of lifting up Americans by helping our veterans and providing food, healthcare, and shelter to the poor and disabled, they’re gutting the VA and the social safety net.
As a result, today nearly half of American children (45% or 34 million kids) rely on food and medical programs that are now targeted by “Christian” Mike Johnson’s House Republicans in their Big Brutal Bill providing trillions in tax breaks to billionaires. The proposed cuts to SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid, for example, would be the largest in the history of the U.S.
Reagan’s Two Santas strategy has done serious harm to America, collapsing the economic futures of two entire generations.
And now they’re going after our government itself.
But, why? Nobody’s sure.
— Did Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or both tell Trump and/or Elon Musk to destroy America?
— Are our country’s billionaires so psychopathically greedy that they’re willing to sell us all out for another few billion dollars in tax breaks?
— Do Trump’s allies believe that if they can impoverish Americans we’ll be more willing to go along with their authoritarian agenda the way Germans did after being immiserated by the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s?
— Are they following the “Dark Enlightenment” philosophers of Silicon Valley who argue that democracy is outdated and “we need to get over our dictator phobia” and let the tech giants run the country?
Nobody knows for sure. Nobody can really explain it.
Republicans are aren’t even pretending anymore; they’re not even bothering to proclaim BS like “trickle down” or the “need to support the job creators.“
Most distressing, there’s virtually no discussion of any of this in the mainstream press.
— The Two Santas strategy is easily documented, but never mentioned.
— The explosion of our national debt is all over economists’ websites, but when the American media mentions it, it’s always in the context of Democrats needing to “reduce spending” rather than the fact that virtually 100% of our debt today was put there exclusively by Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal wars.
— Nobody, it seems, is speculating about why Trump and Musk would want to kill off USAID or kneecap the FAA and the National Weather Service. Qui bono (who benefits?) other than Putin and Xi? The savings are a drop in the billionaire’s bucket; there must be a larger agenda than just funding tax cuts for billionaires.
— And, they’re now holding their votes in the middle of the night; I think we all know what they are hiding and the credulous press is letting pass.
I don’t know why Republicans have been so enthusiastic about first destroying the American middle class and now our government itself, but the consequences have driven the explosion of rightwing anger, racism, and misogyny that’s been sweeping the nation since Trump’s appearance on the scene in 2015.
And now they’re threatening our position in the world, as well as possibly leading us all into a third world war.
Why do you think this is happening?
NOW READ: 'Trump's tactics are in fact communist': Former Tea Party congressman busts MAGA for what it is
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aha 1/20 new pension tag:
RWI is a [target-] rich ecosystem [JOK seeks targets proxy?]; ideological entre look for niche; revolving door part of this system, also incubator which might expose young ppl to ideas and opportunities/funding otherwise not; pension plan also signals to ideol entre new incubator recruits that it's a hood/smart bet because fail does not matter, we got your back / gig; [fe given mktpklace meritocrisy BS]
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trump/
no lnx
How southern white women drove the GOP to Donald Trump
written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon July 1, 2019
“The Long Southern Strategy,” a new book by political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, first caught my eye because there’s a long history of denialism surrounding the “Southern strategy.” People sometimes claim that it’s a liberal myth or that it’s ancient history, or that wasn’t the real reason for the Southern realignment in American politics. That denialism has only intensified and grown more significant since the election of Donald Trump.
But Maxwell and Shields’ book turns out to be more than just well-timed, as its subtitle suggests: “How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.” Rather than simply showing that the Southern strategy was a long-term phenomenon, the book shows that it was a continuously reshaped and evolving strategy, that it was multifaceted — involving gender and religion as crucially as race — and that in remaking the Republican Party and the South, it remade American politics as well. “The Long Southern Strategy” explains this reshaping process remaking better than anything else I’ve read, and does so via a compelling multi-disciplinary combination of history, cultural criticism and social science.
In “The Reactionary Mind” (Salon review here), political theorist Corey Robin argued that conservative politics “speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.” Conservatives may have balked at Robin’s argument, but “The Long Southern Strategy” convincingly describes the specific combination of such losses on which Republicans have played, and the specific form of conservatism that resulted.
The building blocks aren’t old-fashioned racism, sexism and religious fundamentalism — all have been reshaped into new forms, making new arguments for halting progress and turning back the clock, which is also a part of the book’s story. For example, as co-author Angie Maxwell told me, “Modern sexism describes feelings of resentment and distrust towards feminists and working women. Rather than believing that a woman cannot do a particular job, folks who express Modern sexism resents a woman for wanting to do that job.”
“The Long Southern Strategy” also explains why Donald Trump is not such an anomaly after all, but rather the culmination of where the GOP has been headed for the past 50-plus years. “I gave a series of lectures the year before the election, called ‘The Inevitability of Donald Trump,'” Maxwell told me — but even she thought Trump would make it no further than the Republican nomination. She was concerned, however, about how close the election was going to be, because she had applied “modern sexism measures” to national polling in 2012, and found alarmingly high numbers. “I was worried we were not accounting for that effect,” she said. Perhaps not.
So I thought Maxwell would be a perfect interview subject as the 2020 campaign begins in earnest. It’s an invaluable guide for making sense of what’s about to unfold, as well as how we got here. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
First I want to ask about the need to understand the Southern strategy as something long-term and continuing or evolving, not just a one-time event.
In short, with the Southern strategy, the story we tell is that after the Civil Rights Act, first Barry Goldwater and then Richard Nixon really played to white racial angst, and the South flipped to red. But when you start looking at not just the electoral map, but voting trends, the South goes pretty heavily back to Jimmy Carter in 1976. And most Southern politicians don’t change their party IDs during that period of time. You see from archival work and other scholarship how worried the GOP was post-Watergate that the inroads they made in the South they were going to lose. And sure enough, they do.
Now, if they were so adamant on a backlash to civil rights, then why pick Carter? But there this notion that Carter’s one of them — he shares their Southern identity, they understand him, he’s a born-again Christian. So the South kind of goes back [to the Democrats]. Then the Reagan folks in 1980 dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from their platform. This to me is the bridge. In 1980, the Republicans are trying again to win those Southern voters back, because they’ve really based their electoral map on that. They took that fork in the road in the late ’60s, and it’s kind of hard, once you set your strategy, to say, “Oh, let’s just pick a new one.” So they dropped the ERA.
This was a radical thing to do because the Equal Rights Amendment — and second-wave feminism in general — was a completely bipartisan effort. There were legions of Republican women feminists. In fact, they were some of the leaders in the movement. At the 1977 National Women’s Convention, the only national women’s convention we’ve ever had, every living first lady of both parties was there.. All the major congresswomen from both parties were there. What happened then was Phyllis Schlafly’s effort — she had written the book [A Choice, Not An Echo] that kind of inspired Goldwater to run years before — she started an anti-feminism counter rally, also in Houston, and had massive attendance at that, and their slogan was “family values.”
The GOP took notice. Schlafly was hoping it would get her a cabinet position, which it didn’t. But then the Reagan administration polls 40,000 women, an effort headed up by Richard Wirthlin, with Elizabeth Dole, and they classified American women into 64 types. They called them Nancys, Bettys — they give them names —and they realized that there were a whole lot more antifeminists out there than they realized, people who really wanted these traditional gender roles. I call them “antifeminist” because that is what they were calling themselves, a lot of times. Particularly in the South, among white women. And so that move [dropping the ERA] helped Reagan to secure a lot of those Southern white women. And that’s when you actually see people start changing their voter ID....
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general psychology:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21553954
Robert Gifford, professor of psychology and environmental studies at University of Victoria, has charted 34 (previously 29) ‘dragons of inaction,’ which prevent people from responding to evidence of climate change, ranging from a naive belief in “technosalvation,” to lack of attachment to geographic place, to straight-up denial.
While often tangled and deeply rooted, Gifford optimistically concluded a 2011 paper for American Psychologist with the statement: “The dragons of inaction can be beaten back, if not slain.”
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nice recap:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/how-did-monster-get-created-decades-gop-lies-brought-us-donald-trump
How did America get to such a place that someone like Donald Trump can command a lead in the Republican primaries? Trump is the product of a deliberate Republican strategy, adopted by Richard Nixon’s people in 1968, to attract voters with an apocalyptic redemption story rather than reasoned argument. It has taken almost 50 years, but we have finally arrived at the culmination of postmodern politics in which Republican leaders use words to create their own reality.
After World War II, President Dwight Eisenhower and men like New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller led the Republican Party with policies based in reasoned argument. They used the government to regulate the economy and to promote social welfare, much as Democrats did, although with a philosophy that emphasized social unity rather than class conflict. The policies of these “Me Too” Republicans infuriated Movement Conservatives on the far right, who insisted that all government activism was communism. In 1964, Movement Conservative spokesman Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination when Rockefeller’s womanizing spectacularly imploded his candidacy. Movement Conservatives used their hero’s nomination to advance a new kind of politics.
America’s moderate consensus was enormously popular, but Phyllis Schlafly,the president of the Illinois Federation of Republican Women, flat-out denied that reality. In her famous book “A Choice Not an Echo,” she insisted that studies showing that voters opposed Goldwater’s extremism were part of a “propaganda machine” that used fake polls, radio and newspapers to destroy anyone but the chosen candidates of an elite cabal. She explained that all government activism outside of military buildup was a conspiracy to bankrupt regular Americans. Financiers and banking interests fed off expensive policies pushed by an educated Eastern elite, and together these men were dragging America into the web of communism.
The world was really quite simple, Schlafly insisted, and it could be understood without any fancy education. It was divided in two, black and white, Communism and Freedom. Eggheads complained that Goldwater “had one-sentence solutions” for complicated problems, she wrote, but simple solutions were the answer. What should America do about communism? Stop it! The very fact that establishment Republicans opposed Goldwater’s nomination proved that he was the right man for the job. He was the “grass roots” candidate, the candidate for the little guy who voted his principles, not because he wanted a payoff.
Goldwater’s candidacy crashed and burned, leaving Republicans in trouble in 1968. To candidate Richard Nixon was left the task of pulling together mainstream Eisenhower Republicans and upstart Movement Conservatives. How could his team attract support for an unlikable candidate who needed to bridge a fundamental ideological gulf? Nixon’s handlers used new media to play to Schlafly’s script. They ignored people’s brains and went for their guts.
“Voters are basically lazy,” one Nixon media adviser wrote. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we… seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable….” Nixon’s people hired advertising executive Harry Treleaven, who believed the new medium of television had changed the nature of politics. For him, politicians were no longer policy wonks; they were actors with a narrative.
Under Treleaven, Nixon’s people ignored policy positions and instead used television to create a candidate with a simple message: America was on the brink of disaster, and only Nixon could save it. They hired a brilliant young photographer to put together a series of television ads from stock photographs strung together to create a sense of doom; at the end a voice intoned “Nixon” over an iconic image of the nation. At the end of every ad ran the words: “Vote like your whole world depended on it.”
The campaign also hired a young television producer named Roger Ailes to stage “town hall” events for the candidate. Ailes hand-picked “regular” people to question Nixon in carefully managed shows from which the press was excluded. Ailes arranged applause, the set, Nixon’s answers, the camera angles, the crowd cheering the candidate, the careful shading of Nixon’s makeup. “Let’s face it,” he said. “A lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But carefully managed television could “make them forget all that.”
It did. And so, after 1968, Republicans increasingly relied on their apocalyptic redemption story. America was in terrible trouble, because grasping minorities, women and workers wanted government policies that would suck tax dollars from hardworking white people. Democrats backed those policies because they would do anything to buy votes. It was up to Republicans to restore America to its former glory. In a time of dramatic economic and social upheaval, this story reassured voters left behind in the new conditions that the answers to their problems were simple, and that coming up with those answers required no great education or thought. It simply required the right principles.
The Movement Conservative story was never based in reality. Facts repeatedly gave way to the narrative that America was on the ropes because of Democratic social welfare policies that sucked tax dollars and threatened the nation’s safety. Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen represented the misuse of tax dollars for lazy African-Americans, for example, but he also incorrectly insisted that President Carter had slashed the nation’s military budget, and warned in his inaugural address that the nation was in a crisis that rivaled the Great Depression, a crisis created by government activism.
To avoid niggling fact-checkers, in 1987, President Reagan’s FCC abandoned the Fairness Doctrine,a decision that meant that public broadcasters were no longer required to provide their audience with opposing viewpoints. Within a year, talk radio had taken off, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh hammering home the vision of a nation gone to ruin, awaiting redemption from the latest Movement Conservative candidate. In 1992, Limbaugh began to broadcast a television show, produced by Roger Ailes, to take the story to viewers. By 1994, the show was carried by 225 television stations. Two years later, Ailes would become the CEO of a new media channel, Fox News, which used the same formula—albeit updated—that Ailes had used to package Nixon’s story almost 30 years before.
By the time of the George W. Bush administration, the Movement Conservatives had erased the line between image and reality. In 2004, a senior adviser [WHO?] to Bush famously dismissed “the reality-based community” to journalist Ron Suskind. Gone were the days when politicians could find solutions based on their observations of the careful study of discernible reality. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore…. When we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do,” he said.
This disregard for fact in favor of narrative appears to have become so accepted in the Republican Party that it is now openly driving Republican presidential candidates. Trump’s celebrity candidacy follows the formula. According to him, America is in free fall, with GDP below zero, unemployment at 18-20 percent, and the country overrun by minorities—his venom reserved primarily for Mexicans who, he says, are drug dealers, criminals and rapists.
“Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger by the day and we as a country are getting weaker.” Politicians can’t “make America great again” because they are “controlled fully by the lobbyists, by the donors, and by the special interests.” Trump promises to be a “great leader” who has simple answers: He will bring back jobs, make sure Iran doesn’t get nuclear weapons, reduce the debt, in short, find a way to do everything fast and well. “Sadly,” he says, “the American dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”
Trump is the most cartoonish of the Republican candidates, but he is far from being the only one to bend reality to image. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker told a group of Republican donors that British Prime Minister David Cameron had said he had no faith in President Obama’s leadership, a claim Cameron categorically denied. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal insists he has slashed spending 26 percent, a claim professor Robert Mann has eviscerated. Journalist Tom Moran at the Newark Star-Ledger says simply of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, “he lies.”
Perhaps most disturbing is that Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Scott Walker and surgeon Ben Carson, Republican candidates all, have taken to attributing false quotations to the Founding Fathers. They deny the reality of America’s founding principles and claim instead that America was conceived in the image that they have constructed, the same image that has given us Donald Trump as a leading candidate for the presidency.
Heather Cox Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at Boston College.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/books/2014/08/rick_perlstein_s_book_on_reagan_the_invisible_bridge_reviewed.html
f anyone is able to buy a copy of Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, we’ll know that Craig Shirley lost. Last week, in advance of the Tuesday release of the third volume of Perlstein’s conservative movement history, right-winger Shirley claimed that Perlstein had plagiarized his book about Ronald Reagan’s 1976 primary challenge to President Gerald Ford. Shirley was asking for every copy of The Invisible Bridge to be destroyed, and for $25 million to be kindly deposited in his bank account.
David Weigel
DAVID WEIGEL
David Weigel is a Slate political reporter.
Perlstein’s publisher did not budge. Shirley was credited in the book, after all, for saving the new author “3.76 months in research,” and the endnotes (published online, not in the book) slathered him with attributions. Simon and Schuster quickly rebutted the charges. The “plagiarism” story rocketed around the righty Internet anyway. The Daily Caller phoned up Shirley, who called the new book “a liberal’s version of conservative history.” The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes, who had written the foreword to Shirley’s book, dutifully warned readers of the new controversy.
It was already plenty surreal, and then Roger Stone showed up. On Twitter, the Republican dirty trickster (whose avatar shows off his Richard Nixon back tattoo) asked whether the “lefty propagandist” was guilty of plagiarism. On Facebook, Stone continued his Purple Rose of Cairo act, walking from his history pages onto Perlstein’s wall, challenging and tweaking him. “Everyone in this controversy is a partisan,” wrote Stone, “but then, controversy sells books.”
Ronald Reagan only made sense when the rest of America didn’t.
This just isn’t what happens when Rick Perlstein releases a book. The first in his series, 2001’s Before the Storm, was praised by William F. Buckley. George Will called it “the best book yet on the social ferments that produced Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy”—in a largely positive review of Perlstein’s second book, Nixonland, which became a best-seller. What changed? This time Perlstein is writing about Ronald Reagan.
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http://www.publiceye.org/research/policy.html archive
new http://www.politicalresearch.org/
http://www.bridgeproject.com/
research tools:
Power Structure Research
Power Structure Research is a method of analysis based on criticizing unfair systems, structures, and institutions in society.
Power Structure Research rejects conspiracy theory as a useful form of analysis and instead looks at social, political, economic, and cultural practices that create, expand, defend, or restore inequalities based on race, gender, or class.
Power Structure Research unveils the social costs of corporate activities in terms of work, government policies, the quality of life, and the sustainability of a healthy planet.
Read More About Power Structure Research
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What they Say to Their Allies
Want to see and hear what the current leading Republican Presidential candidates say when the speak to the leading Christian Right activists?
Held annually in Washington, DC, the Values Voter Summits are the most important public meeting of the organized Christian Right in the United States.
These are huge, raw, unedited video files that I videoed for notes and fact-checking quotes for my articles.
Videos:
- Newt Gingrich 2010 (with introduction)
- Ron Paul 2011 (excerpt)
- Mitt Romney 2009 (excerpt)
More to come...
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AlterNet [1] / By Evan McMurry [2]
5 Craziest Laws Passed by GOP Legislators, Just This Month
May 28, 2014 |
Only in D.C. does the Republican Party drop like an anvil on any improvements to the country that could conceivably pass through our bicameral legislature. In our various state houses, the GOP is busy passing laws rather than squashing them.
And what laws they pass: divining menaces to the Republic in everything from high-speed buses to homeless people’s knapsacks to solar panels, state-level Republicans have gone on the offense. More often than not they've succeeded in getting laws passed that range from counterproductive to downright cruel. Below are the five craziest and most destrcutive, just in the past couple of months.
- Missouri Legalizes Shooting People for Being in Your Section
Feeling the Castle Doctrine defined “castle” too narrowly, Missouri State Representative Joe Don McGaugh proposed a bill allowing any citizen to use deadly force to protect against unlawful entry of private property. “This is a common sense extension of the law that would empower a nanny or babysitter, or anyone with the owner’s permission to occupy a property, to defend himself or herself against an intruder,” he said.
Unfortunately, McGaugh didn’t write his bill very carefully, and the Missouri House ended up passing a law that endorses use of deadly force by anyone pretty much anywhere. The bill allows for force by “occupants” of “private property"— conditions written so loosely that occupants could refer to a diner or a baseball game attendee or someone watching a movie, while invasion could mean anybody they feel intruding on whatever property they happen to be on.
As Think Progress explained [3], the bill is basically Stand Your Ground, except it replaces the threat of immediate physical harm with the feeling of invasion. Feel threatened in a business by someone you don’t think belongs there? Take out your gun and start shooting. Or, to quote Charles Pierce [4], “If you're at a Royals game, don't even think about moving down to the really good seats unless you feel lucky, punk.”
- Florida City Tries to Make it Illegal for Homeless People to Own Stuff
The city of Ft. Lauderdale recently took up a resolution that would make it illegal for homeless people keep their possessions anywhere on public property. The resolution would allow police to confiscate any property stored on a public ground, provided twenty-four hours notice is given; confiscated property may be retrieved, if the person pays a “reasonable” fee for storage and transportation.
The city claims the ordinance is due in part to an “interest in aesthetics,” but as homeless people have no alternative method for hanging on to their belongings, the resolution effectively criminalizes their only possessions.
“Maintaining city streets is a legitimate concern, but simply punishing homeless people for leaving their possessions in public places is not an effective or humane way to address it,” Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty said [5] to Think Progress. “Instead, city and business leaders should work with advocates and homeless people to develop alternative short and long term solutions, such as public storage options for homeless people and affordable housing.”
The resolution is, of course, backed by the city’s business community, which merely finds homeless people an eyesore.
- Oklahoma Bans Increases in the Minimum Wage
While the Obama administration raises the minimum wage threshold for private contractors working with the government, Democrats in Congress push for a $10.10 minimum wage, and Seattle votes in the country’s highest minimum at $15.00 an hour, Oklahoma is going in the exact opposite direction: not only is Oklahoma not considering a statewide increase, but it banned individual cities [6] from even considering such a raise on their own.
The move was widely viewed as a preemptive attack on a movement by the Central Oklahoma Labor Federation to raise the Oklahoma City’s wage to $10.10, in line with that being called for by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.
Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin and her fellow Republicans in the legislature argued [7] the bill created a “level playing field for all municipalities in Oklahoma” and protected against “artificial” raises in the minimum wage, whatever those are.
"Mandating an increase in the minimum wage would…would create a hardship for small business owners, stifle job creation and increase costs for consumers," Fallin said. "And it would do all of these things without even addressing the goal of reducing poverty."
Not quite. The statistics on the relation of minimum wage to job creation or loss are murky, but most studies find raising the wage’s overall affect on employment to be negligible. Two things raising the minimum wage definitely does: increases earnings for lower-income workers (by $33 billion in the case of a nationwide raise to $10.10) and lifts almost one million people out of poverty. Neither is something metropolises in Oklahoma are going to find out about any time soon.
- Oklahoma Punishes Solar and Wind Power Producers
Oklahoma wasn’t done. Unhappy with people who install their own solar panels or wind turbines, an action that helps the utilities by easing the pressure on the companies during peak hours, the state is now penalizing private energy producers through a surcharge [8].
The extra charge applies to those who sell excess energy generated by the panels or turbines back to the grid, known as net metering. It was snuck in as a rider on another bill at the last minute, catching lawmakers and alternative energy groups off guard. It passed without a single dissenting vote.
It didn’t take long for Oklahoman owners of small businesses to point out the absurdity of a law that punishes in-state producers of energy.
“Oklahoma offers tax credits for large wind turbines which are built elsewhere, but wants to penalize small wind which we manufacture here in the state?” Mike Bergey, president & CEO of Bergey Windpower said [8]. “That makes no sense to me.”
Who would support such a bill? The ultra-conservative advocacy group ALEC, which has framed people with solar panels as “freeriders on the system,” though they actually contribute to the city’s power resources. ALEC is in good with Fallin. Thanks to this cozy relationship, Oklahoma is set to become the first state to pass a law of this kind. Where states have deals worked out between utility companies and individual power generators, ALEC is set on repealing them. They now have a template in a last-minute sabotoage in Oklahoma.
- Tennessee Outlaws High-Speed Mass Transit
A proposed high-speed bus system in Nashville got on the bad side of the Tennessee legislature last month. But rather than fix or alter the suggested plans, Tennessee senators solved the matter by passing a bill against high-speed mass transit altogether.
The Amp was designed as a 7-mile high-speed bus line connecting various parts of Nashville, which would make it Tennessee’s first mass transit system [9], and had the support of the business community. With Nashville’s congestion getting worse and a million residents expected to move to the city over the next twenty years, the plan seemed like a no-brainer.
But to work, the high-speed bus systems needed a dedicated line and traffic signal priority. This angered drivers. Wealthier residents began complaining [10] of the undesirable elements the transit system could bring through their neighborhood, with one expressing the fear that it could bring “burger flippers” through her neighborhood. Then a major auto-dealer began sponsoring lawn signs opposing the plan, fearing a functional mass transit system could hurt sales.
That’s when the Koch Brothers got involved. Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee sprung into existence, staffed entirely with lobbyists and blessed with an undisclosed budget. Shortly thereafter, a bill appeared in the Tennessee legislature making it illegal “for buses to pick up or drop off passengers in the center lane of a state road”—effectively outlawing the Amp and any transit system like it. The bill’s sponsor said [11] he worried parking spaces might be sacrificed to make room for the line—the ultimate expression of a car-centered culture bewildered by the need, to say nothing of the desire, for public transportation.
The bill passed the state Senate without much opposition. But in the end, this was too much, even for Tennessee. The single-lane legislation was ultimately rendered irrelevant [12] when the Tennessee legislature negotiated a deal to allow the project to go forward with greater oversight from the legislature.
But the Kochs had shown how easy it could be to derail a city’s much-needed mass transit project with a friendly congressman and an indomitable fear of taking away a single parking space.
See more stories tagged with:
gop [14],
republicans [15],
legislation [16],
tennessee [17],
florida [18],
oklahoma [19]
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/5-craziest-laws-passed-gop-legislators-just-month
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/evan-mcmurry
[3] http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/05/07/3435145/missouri-house-passes-bill-that-could-authorize-the-babysitter-the-bar-patron-and-the-grocery-shopper-to-use-deadly-force/
[4] http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/laboratories-of-democracy-050814
[5] http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/04/21/3428899/fort-lauderdale-criminalize-homelessness/
[6] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/15/oklahoma-minimum-wage_n_5152496.html
[7] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Fallin-signs-minimum-wage-hike-ban-in-Oklahoma-5401810.php
[8] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/04/16/3427392/oklahoma-fee-solar-wind/
[9] http://www.salon.com/2014/04/01/why_are_the_kochs_trying_to_stop_a_transit_project_in_nashville/
[10] http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/03/inside-nashvilles-oddly-ugly-bus-rapid-transit-debate/8540/
[11] http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2014/03/27/tenn-senate-approves-bill-block-amp-bus-project/6956069/
[12] http://www.wired.com/2014/04/tennessee-bans-bus-rapid-transit/
[13] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on 5 Craziest Laws Passed by GOP Legislators, Just This Month
[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/gop
[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/republicans-0
[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/legislation
[17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/tennessee
[18] http://www.alternet.org/tags/florida-0
[19] http://www.alternet.org/tags/oklahoma
[20] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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Have you ever been in a fight with someone who just won’t listen to common sense? Who just refuses to acknowledge the meticulously peer-reviewed authority of your studies and graphs and statistics? If you are used to talking to people about climate change, the answer is probably yes.
This week in the New Yorker, Maria Konnikova writes about research by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, on how to make people change their incorrect beliefs in the face of fact. The short version: Uh, good luck.
The study tracked 2000 families’ beliefs about the safety of vaccine, before and after several different kinds of interventions: Families received pamphlets, some filled with facts about the lack of evidence linking vaccines to diseases like autism, from the Centers for Disease Control; another brochure talked about the dangers of the illnesses vaccines are meant to hold at bay; the other two sets of pamphlets just presented stories about individuals, or dramatic images of what happens when you don’t vaccinate your kids.
The results? Nothing. Or worse: Some families who had already been side-eye-ing vaccinations became even more likely to hunker down in their existing beliefs, in what’s known as “the backfire effect.” In this case, people either distrusted the material even more or else assimilated the fear-inducing pictures and stories about measles and mumps into their existing distaste for vaccines.
Early on in his studies of these kinds of false beliefs, Nyhan realized that when false information is related to someone’s self-identity, it is much more likely to become entrenched than just any random error.
Konnikova and her subject focus mainly on politics and public health issues, but there are plenty of examples of fact-blindness when it comes to climate change. Konnikova drops a mention of one study from 2012, in which researchers gave subjects fake climate news articles to read. Depending on the subject’s political identity, he or she perceived the information differently, even when the article covered relatively neutral ground.
As Grist’s Ben Adler pointed out recently, for conservatives who have built their political identity on smaller government, to admit climate change is a real problem is to admit there’s a chink in the armor of your identity: Climate change simply demands government intervention, and in a big way. And the effect can be as subtle or extreme as one’s political views: As Mother Jones reported on Tuesday, self-identifying Tea Partiers in New Hampshire are twice as likely to distrust environmental science than their less-conservative Republican peers.
There is one ray of hope in this polarized, warming world — a small sign that people are capable of shedding damaging associations of their identity, to focus on the facts in front of them. That hope comes from a technique called “self-affirmation,” which is most often cited as a way to help women and minorities shed unconscious, self-deprecating biases before taking a difficult test. By focusing on their own strengths and past successes beforehand, and shedding the notion thatI’m really bad at this, test-takers are more likely to score highly.
How does this apply to convincing people to trust the facts on something like climate change? Well, if we can take the conversation out of the realm of identity politics, then people may be more able to accept objectively what science is telling us. If we can change the terms of the argument from, You’re killing the planet by driving that SUV, to something like, It’s not me vs. you, it’s bigger than both of us, we might just open some minds.
Nyhan uses raw milk as an example — science has shown that unpasteurized dairy is a real public health threat, but raw-milk advocates identify as holistically healthy individuals ready to reap the microbial benefits straight from the cow. So instead of challenging that identity with science on the riskiness of that behavior, it could be more effective to focus on the non-controversial track record of pasteurized milk. (Nyhan’s group will be publishing the results of s study applying self-affirmation to these kinds of debates soon.)
Whether it’s possible to do that with climate change remains to be seen — just the words “climate change” tend automatically to split an audience into allies and enemies — but it’s possible that shifting the dialogue to focus on energy efficiency, independence, and technological innovation will bear some bipartisan fruit. (Then again,maybe not.)
For now, try this at your next contentious climate change debate: Have I mentioned how nice your hair looks today, Rush? It reminds me of this one hockey stick graph…
Amelia Urry is Grist's internhttp://grist.org/climate-energy/heres-why-your-uncle-wont-give-up-those-pesky-climate-vaccine-conspiracy-theories/
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....et’s start with what I said about Limbaugh simply being a good conservative when he rushed to Sterling’s defense. That’s not just a liberal canard. It’s not just me trying to do to Limbaugh what Limbaugh does to liberals. It’s what conservatives themselves have said repeatedly over the years. The defense of hierarchy is what conservatism is all about, as Corey Robin reminded us all with his recent book, “The Reactionary Mind.”
What’s more, the differences between how liberals and conservatives think are reflected in a range of divergent cognitive processes, as summarized in a 2003 paper by John T. Jost and three co-authors, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” a “meta-analysis” that brought together findings drawn from 88 study samples in 12 countries:
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“The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat,” Jost and his co-authors wrote in the abstract. These are not merely American phenomena, nor is there any reason to think they’re particularly modern.
While Jost’s paper revealed a complicated array of different factors involved, two in particular have been shown to explain the lion’s share of intergroup prejudice: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). John Dean’s book“Conservatives Without Conscience” focused on the combined workings of these two factors. While there is some overlap between the two, RWA is more predominant among followers, who would probably make up the main bulk of Limbaugh’s audience, while SDO is more prominent in folks like Sterling.
SDO represents a generalized tendency to support groups’ dominance, whether the groups are defined biologically (men over women, the old over the young) or culturally (race, ethnicity, religion, etc.).
There have been several successive versions of the scale used to measure SDO (SDO 6 can be found here), with slight changes in the statements used. Subjects are asked to rate their agreement or disagreement with the statements from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). Statements from SDO-6 include:
- Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups.
- In getting what you want, it is sometimes necessary to use force against other groups.
- It’s OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others.
These are balanced with statements supporting equality, such as:
- It would be good if groups could be equal.
- Group equality should be our ideal.
- All groups should be given an equal chance in life.
It’s not hard to see why SDO relates to defense of hierarchy, and can serve to support the defense of just about any privileged group. It’s not one and the same thing as conservatism, but it’s an integral part of the mix, and conservatives as a group routinely score significantly higher on SDO than liberals as a group do.
But what about the connection to evil?
A few weeks ago, I came across a reference to an unpublished conference paper, with the intriguing title, “Does endorsement of hierarchy make you evil? SDO and psychopathy.”
So I contacted the lead author, Marc Wilson, a New Zealand psychologist at Victoria University of Wellington, to ask him about his research.
First, a bit of background. Psychopathy — once thought to be an all-or-nothing condition — is now understood in a dimensional fashion (more or less) and is measured by instruments such asThe Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. While our understanding of psychopathy first developed largely from studying criminal populations, Hare himself has said, “I always said that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock exchange,” so it’s fairly straightforward to measure and compare psychopathic tendencies and SDO. And that’s just what Wilson has done.
“The research shows that SDO and psychopathy have a reciprocal causal relationship over time — as people become more social dominant, they become more psychopathic, and vice versa,” Wilson told me. “This is based on longitudinal research that shows that, for example, increased SDO (or psychopathy) at time 1 predicts greater psychopathy (or SDO) at time 2. I’ve done this for both convenience samples (university students) and thousands of general population.”
University students get tested a lot — as Wilson indicated, they’re quite convenient. But sooner or later it’s bound to raise questions of just how well the results hold up in a larger population. So it’s significant that he’s already taken that step, and found confirmation as well.
“When SDO was originally proposed, it was argued that group dominance (as measured by SDO) is not the same thing as individual level dominance, and indeed that’s what the original research appeared to show,” he explained. “More recently there have been a few studies that have suggested SDO and psychopathy are related, and I’ve collected a lot of data now that leads me to believe they’re flip sides of the same coin — interpersonal dominance (psychopathy) on one side and group dominance (SDO) on the other.”
This is just what one might informally conclude from listening to the Donald Sterling tape. His personal abusiveness and unwarranted accusations against V. Stiviano is on one side of the coin; flip it over, and his contempt for black people is on the other. Jerk on one side, racist on the other.
“Therefore, it makes sense that environments that promote social hierarchies will also be fertile breeding grounds for individual dominance, and vice versa,” he continued. Digging down a bit into specifics was quite illuminating.
“By ‘environments’ I can imagine a few that are good candidates — financial markets for example,” Wilson said. “Indeed, some of my other work shows that people who work in commerce focused on hierarchy-enhancing wealth consolidation also tend to be more social dominant (an old finding) but also more psychopathic — indeed, people who study commerce at university are not only more psychopathic than people in other fields of study but less psychopathic commerce students are more likely to switch majors to more hierarchy-attenuating disciplines, while more psychopathic arts students (for example) are more likely to switch to commerce degrees.”
Crazy artists? Try crazy businessmen. Crazy stock-traders. That’s what Wilson’s research shows you’re far more likely to find. Not the wild-eyed kind of crazy we’ve all been led to expect, but the button-down, conservative kind we heard in the Donald Sterling tape — or that we can hear on Limbaugh’s radio show, or see on Fox News any day of the week.
Paul H. Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Lengths News, a biweekly serving the Los Angeles harbor area. He runs the site Merge Left, a community of progressive thinkers free to submit their own content.
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http://www.alternet.org/why-right-wingers-think-way-they-do-fascinating-psychological-origins-political-ideology
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Thu, 2012-03-29 03:39Chris Mooney
http://www.desmogblog.com/print/6174