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The U.S./Mexico border crisis has been a source of major tension between the Biden Administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. President Joe Biden, on Friday, January 26, declared that he will "shut down" the United States' southern border if necessary.
In an article published by The Nation on January 30, progressive legal expert Elie Mystal is vehemently critical of Abbott's handling of the border crisis in Texas — even comparing his actions to a "Civil War reenactment."
"The flash point for this crisis is, of course, the border,' Mystal explains. "I have written before about Eagle Pass, Tex., as a place along the Rio Grande where it is popular for immigrants to make the crossing. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has erected a series of sadistic obstructions across this part of the river — including buoys ringed with razor wire and underwater traps — meant to maim and even drown people trying to swim across the river. Should people, and their children, survive Abbott's gauntlet, Texas officials on the other side have been accused of pushing them back into the river, or denying the survivors medical aid or even water."
Mystal warns that tensions between Abbott and the Biden Administration go way beyond a "constitutional crisis."
"People will say Texas is merely 'causing a constitutional crisis' as opposed to spoiling for civil war," Mystal argues. "But that is the wrong frame. There is no 'constitutional' crisis here, because there is nothing up for reasonable interpretation."
The legal expert continues, "Texas is violating the Constitution, as well as a court order, and it's doing so in order to continue to hurt desperate people.… This is not a legal crisis: This is a rebellion against federal authority and the basic human decency that it's trying to provide…. If Gov. Abbott tries to further obstruct the operations of the federal government and continues to violate the Supreme Court's order, he should be arrested for treason."
READ MORE:Trump calls on 'all willing states' to blatantly defy SCOTUS border ruling in Texas
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*The Federal Government has broad constitutional powers in determining what aliens shall be admitted to the United States, the period they may remain, regulation of their conduct before naturalization, and the terms and conditions of their naturalization… Under the Constitution, the states are granted no such powers." — Takahashi v. Fish & Game Comm'n (1948)
For decades, the Supreme Court has been clear that the federal government, not the states, has the power to regulate immigration. Since 2021, however, Texas has been spending billions annually to impose its own vision of immigration policy — an effort known as "Operation Lone Star." Using members of the Texas National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety, "Operation Lone Star personnel work around-the-clock to detect and repel illegal crossings." Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has pledged to "hold the line" at the southern border due to alleged inaction by the Biden administration.
Over the years, Operation Lone Star has become increasingly aggressive. In 2024, it has brought the country to the precipice of a Constitutional crisis.
:{:{The epicenter of the confrontation between Texas and the federal government is Shelby Park, a municipal park in Eagle Pass, Texas, that abuts the Rio Grande River. In this map of the area, submitted by the federal government in a legal filing, the area of the park is defined by the yellow line and the river:}:
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Texas has seized control of Shelby Park, enclosing the entire 47 acres in razor wire and denying entry to the U.S. Border Patrol.
*Texas National Guard soldiers wait nearby the boat ramp where law enforcement enter the Rio Grande at Shelby Park on January 27, 2024 in Eagle Pass, Texas.
Access to Shelby Park is important to federal authorities because it is used as a "staging area for policing and interdiction operations along the Rio Grande." This includes the use of a boat ramp in the park to access the Rio Grande.
Texas' seizure of Shelby Park and refusal to allow federal officials access have created an extremely dangerous situation. On January 12, three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned in the Rio Grande near the park. When Border Patrol agents went to Shelby Park to address the situation and help other migrants in distress, guardsmen from the Texas National Guard refused to let them enter, saying "they had been ordered not to allow Border Patrol access to the park."
The legal battle between Texas and the federal government over Shelby Park began when Texas sued the federal government for cutting and removing some of the razor wire it installed along the Rio Grande. Border Patrol argued that the razor wire was putting its agents and migrants legally entitled to claim asylum at risk. Texas argued that the federal government was illegally destroying its property. The state eventually won an injunction from the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, prohibiting the federal government from disturbing Texas' razor wire. The federal government, however, appealed to the Supreme Court. On January 22, in a brief order, the Supreme Court sided with the federal government and lifted the injunction.
Texas' response to the Supreme Court order has been alarming. Abbott issued a statement stating that "[t]he federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States." Compact theory was championed by John C. Calhoun, one of the staunchest defenders of slavery. It essentially views states as "independent sovereigns" that are free to reject federal authority. It was used to justify the "nullification" of federal laws and, ultimately, secession from the union by Southern states.
As law professor Steven Vladeck notes, the specific constitutional argument Abbott is advancing makes even less sense. This is the key excerpt from Abbott's letter:
I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.
Abbott is claiming that he can simply declare an "invasion" and grant himself authority that "supersedes any federal statutes." This is legal hogwash.
Article I, § 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution declares that "no State shall, without the Consent of Congress… engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay." In this case, Texas is not being invaded. Migrants, many of whom have legitimate claims of asylum, presenting themselves at the border is not an invasion. Illegal border crossings are something that occurs under every administration and does not constitute an invasion. Further, Abbott is not responding by engaging in "war." He has not invaded Mexico. He has put up some razor wire. But his actions are, according to Vladeck, "antithetical to the constitutional structure of our federal system," which establishes the supremacy of federal law.
Notably, Texas is not yet defying the Supreme Court's January 22 order. That order simply lifted the Fifth Circuit injunction preventing the federal government from removing the razor wire installed by Texas in Shelby Park. The Supreme Court hasn't yet ordered Texas to do anything.
But Texas is continuing to interfere with the federal government's access to Shelby Park, in clear violation of the Constitution and federal law. On January 23, the Department of Homeland Security wrote a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), demanding "the ability to access the border in the Shelby Park area that is currently obstructed by Texas." In a January 26 response, Paxton rejected the Department of Homeland Security's request and informed the federal government that Texas will continue "to protect its southern border against every effort by the Biden Administration to undermine the State’s constitutional right of self-defense."
The conflict that Texas is creating with the federal government will almost certainly end up back at the Supreme Court. And Texas is inviting a constitutional crisis by signaling that it is prepared to ignore the Supreme Court if it does not get its way.
The new confederacy
The radical and dangerous legal theories being advanced by Texas previously provoked a Civil War and have been broadly rejected for more than a century. So, one might expect Texas to get little support from other states. That is not the case.
On January 25, the Republican Governors Association released a letter — signed by 25 Republican governors — "supporting Texas' constitutional right to self-defense." The governors write that they "stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border." They also explicitly endorsed compact theory, which was used to justify secession. "The authors of the U.S. Constitution made clear that in times like this, states have a right of self-defense, under Article 4, Section 4 and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution," the governors write. "Because the Biden Administration has abdicated its constitutional compact duties to the states, Texas has every legal justification to protect the sovereignty of our states and our nation." The letter was signed by every Republican governor except Phil Scott (R-VT).
Former President Donald Trump is also supporting Abbott. Trump called on "all willing States to deploy their guards to Texas to prevent the entry of Illegals."
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), and numerous members of Congress have also aligned themselves with Abbott. Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) said Texas should tell the Supreme Court to "go to hell." Roy was so proud of this remark, he made a special graphic for his social media accounts.
Inviting chaos
Claiming that Texas has a duty to ignore the authority of the federal government unsurprisingly attracts dangerous extremists. "A trucker convoy of 'patriots' is heading to the U.S. border with Mexico next week," Vice reports. The group, which has dubbed itself "God's Army," believes they are "on a mission to stand up against the 'globalists' who they claim are conspiring to keep U.S. borders open and destroy the country."
A fundraising effort for the group has already raised more than $113,000. "Once willing to die defending this country, now willing to die protecting my family from what this country has become," one anonymous donor wrote. The convoy is being heavily promoted by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. “There’s a war literally happening now for America,” Jones said.
The convoy is expected to reach Eagle Pass on February 3.
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twenty-two House Republicans have signed on to a motion filed in federal court requesting to be allowed to join Governor Greg Abbott in defending the Texas Republican against a federal government lawsuit alleging his 1000 feet of razor wire and floating buoys constructed of circular saw blades, designed to prevent migrants from crossing into the United States from Texas, are illegal.
They have invoked the Bible’s Book of Genesis, including Noah’s Ark, to make their case.
“In a motion filed on behalf of U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, and other GOP members, lawyers for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation have asked to be part of the case and targeted how a key law is interpreted in it,” the Houston Chronicle reports.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation is the right-wing organization The New York Times last year profiled as “The Texas Group Waging a National Crusade Against Climate Action.”
RELATED: Supreme Court in Hand, Far Right Wing Prepares to ‘Take the Reins of Government’
The buoys, deployed on the Rio Grande river, may have led to the deaths of two migrants, possibly including a child.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas called the buoys “barbaric,” and in video showed they are constructed of circular saw blades. In that video Congressman Castro also points to Governor Abbott’s razor wire fences.
Sawyer Hackett, a senior advisor to former Obama Cabinet Secretary Julián Castro, referred to the floating fences as “razor wire death trap buoys.”
“A key point to the Arrington group’s defense is whether the 1,900-mile Rio Grande should be defined as a navigable waterway despite being used by thousands of boats every year,” The Chronicle explains. “They point to a court case from 1870 that suggested that the term navigable waterway is intended to mean moving commerce from one state to another or to a different country and not just one where any small boat occasionally uses the river.”
READ MORE: Critics Blast Top US Conservative Think Tank President for Applauding Italy’s Election of ‘Neo-Fascist’ Prime Minister
That’s where the Bible and Noah’s Ark come in.
“Indeed, if one takes the Book of Genesis literally, then the entire world was once navigable by boats large enough to carry significant amounts of livestock,” the proposed amicus brief reads. “Under the federal government’s theory, these anecdotes would render any structure built anywhere in Texas an obstruction to navigation subject to federal regulation.”
Governor Abbott has had a long partnership with the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
In 2016, as NCRM reported, Abbott while at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, unveiled a major policy plan toalter the U.S. Constitution, adding nine amendments,the result of which could have lead to same-sex marriage bans and an end of LGBTQ protections.
According to Congressman Arrington, the list of signatories to his amicus brief include: Rep. Jodey Arrington, Dr. Michael Burgess, Rep. August Pfluger, Rep. Brian Babin, Rep. Andy Biggs, Rep. Roger Williams, Rep. Lance Gooden, Rep. Beth Van Duyne, Rep. Jake Ellzey, Rep. Vern Buchanan, Rep. Chip Roy, Rep. Nathaniel Moran, Rep. David Rouzer, Rep. Pete Sessions, Rep. Ronny Jackson, Rep. Sam Graves, Rep. Clay Higgins, Rep. Michael Cloud, Rep. Keith Self, Rep. John Carter, Rep. Jeff Duncan, Rep. Kat Cammack.
Watch the video above or at this link.
'Very scary': Former RNC staffer dishes on the more terrifying members of GOP's right-wing
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as the heatwave currently plaguing Texas prevails, San Antonio Mayor Mark Nirenberg's frustration with Texas state lawmakers grows, Politico reports.
According to Reuters, President Joe Biden recently "instructed the Department of Labor to ramp up enforcement of on-the-job heat hazards" in states like Texas "by increasing inspections at construction and agriculture sites, and to issue Hazard Alerts that inform employers of their responsibilities and employees of their rights during extreme heat."
Last month, Texas Public Radio (TPR) reportedTexas Republican Governor Greg Abbott passed a bill — which opponents call the "Death Star Bill" — that "poses serious health risks" to construction workers, "bars cities and counties from passing regulations that are stricter than state ones," and "overturns local rules such as ordinances in Austin and Dallas that mandate rest breaks for construction workers."
READ MORE:Texas 'Death Star Bill' could leave construction workers 'fatigued, disoriented, dehydrated': report
Politico reports Nirenberg, on Sunday's segment of CBS' Face the Nation, said, "We're certainly grateful for a president now that's treating this heatwave with the urgency that I think is necessary. Especially given the fact that one of the challenges that we have is, cities in Texas are fighting our legislature and our state government for local control. We're trying to protect residents and workers, and they are doing everything they can to prevent that from happening."
READ MORE: 'No end in sight' for massive heat wave plaguing Texas, New Mexico: NWS
Politico's full report is available at this link. Reuters' report is here (subscription required).
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Houston schools eliminate librarians and 'repurpose' libraries into 'discipline centers'
David Badashand The New Civil Rights Movement July 27, 2023
The Houston Independent School District, the largest in Texas and the eighth-largest in the United States, will eliminate librarian positions in 28 schools and turn libraries into what are being called “discipline centers,” according to Click2Houston.
Mike Myles, the state-installed schools superintendent and former charter schools CEO, earlier this month announced cuts of up to 600 central office positions.
Texas has a $32 billion state surplus but rather than allocate needed funds to public schools, lawmakers in the majority-Republican state legislature, at the behest of Governor Greg Abbott, just delivered a massive property tax cut.
The move to gut librarians and massively reduce access to books and other material does not appear to be budget related, as librarians will be allowed to apply for other positions.
READ MORE: Nancy Mace Tells Prayer Breakfast About Refusing Sex With Her Fiancé This Morning: ‘I’ll See Him Later’
KHOU reports libraries at those 28 schools “will be repurposed into ‘team centers’ where students who had to be removed from class due to behavioral issues will be placed to watch their class virtually.”
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Former HISD librarian and Manager of Library Services, Janice Newsum, says, “When students engage in reading as an activity of choice, they are not only building that reading muscle, but they are also developing their vocabulary they are understanding a bit about the world that exists outside their block radius.”
Mayor Sylvester Turner appeared to suggest the schools that are losing their librarians are already underserved.
“You don’t close libraries in some of the schools in your most underserved communities, and you’re keeping libraries open in other schools,” Turner said.
Watch Click2Houston’s report below or at this link.
: report
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texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed legislation earlier this week that "poses serious health risks" to construction workers, Texas Public Radio (TPR) reports.
Per TPR, HB 2127 — known as the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act — "bars cities and counties from passing regulations that are stricter than state ones. It also overturns local rules such as ordinances in Austin and Dallas that mandate rest breaks for construction workers."
Republican State Rep. Dustin Burrows, who proposed the "Death Star Bill," insisted "the law is needed to end 'the current hodgepodge of onerous and burdensome regulations,'" but TPR notes "for construction workers in two of the state's fastest-growing cities, advocates say, it poses serious health risks."
READ MORE: Neither 'compassion' nor 'leadership': Greg Abbott blasted for calling shooting victims 'illegal immigrants'
Mario Ontiveros told TPR "he once saw a co-worker lose consciousness and fall from a ladder," and due to his previous "safety training," the Texas construction worker "was the only one on the job site who knew how to help — performing CPR and asking his co-worker basic questions to keep him conscious — until paramedics arrived, he said."
The Texas Tribune reports:
Texas is the state where the most workers die from high temperatures, government data shows. At least 42 workers died in Texas between 2011 and 2021 from environmental heat exposure, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workers’ unions claim this data doesn’t fully reflect the magnitude of the problem because heat-related deaths are often recorded under a different primary cause of injury.
Furthermore, according to TPR, "Research published in 2018 — eight years after Austin passed its rest-break ordinance — found that construction workers were 35% more likely to get a break because of the rule."
Daniela Hernandez, state legislative coordinator for Texas advocacy group Workers Defense Action Fund, said, "We know that workers do pass out and experience heat stress and different types of heat illnesses."
READ MORE: Gov. Greg Abbott leaves experts stunned as he injects politics into Texas' criminal justice system
Paul Puente, executive secretary of the Houston Gulf Coast Building and Construction Trades Council, said the "Death Star Bill" is expected to "strike down construction-worker protections in southeast Texas," and "negatively impact construction safety as a whole," even though "labor unions can still negotiate for rest breaks."
He emphasized "Science has already shown that individuals need to have time to take a break, collect their thoughts, and then return back to work to ensure a safe working environment," and "Without allotted rest breaks in extreme heat," he told TPR "workers can easily become fatigued, disoriented, dehydrated — effects that endanger their lives."
Calling the state "unsafe" for construction workers, Puente added, "when you're trying to encourage businesses to come to your state, this is not a good look."
TPR reports the law is set to go into effect Sept. 1.
READ MORE: 'Absolutely insane': Texas Governor Greg Abbott seeks pardon for man convicted of murdering BLM protester
Texas Public Radio's full report is available at this link. The Texas Tribune's report is here.
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new report refutes Greg Abbott’s claim that his office was unaware of DeSantis’ migrant stunt
October 21, 2022
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's (R) office was aware of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' migrant stunt despite previous claims that it had no involvement in helping him, KSAT-12 report...
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'Macabre': Texas schools send out DNA kits after Greg Abbott signed law following Uvalde massacre
David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement October 17, 2022
Texas school districts have begun distribution of DNA kits to parents after GOP Governor Greg Abbott signed a law mandating they be made available in the wake of the horrific mass shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 students and two teachers were slaughtered in May.
“The state Legislature passed a law in spring 2021 requiring the Texas Education Agency to give inkless in-home fingerprint and DNA identification cards to each public school system in Texas,” The Houston Chronicle reports. “The kits will be made available at each primary-level campus. The cards are intended to be kept by guardians who can give them to law enforcement in order to potentially help find missing or trafficked children.”
The kits are available to any parent or guardian who requests them. They can be used to identify the bodies of their children in the event of another school mass shooting, or other event where it is difficult to ID a child.
READ MORE: ‘Ghoulish’ Greg Abbott Slammed as a ‘Monster’ for ‘Inhumane’ Response to Deaths of 50 People Locked in Tractor-Trailer
Brandi Smith, an Emmy award-winning anchor and reporter at KHOU responded to the news, saying on social media that a “follower forwarded me the email about the DNA kits he received from Clear Creek ISD last week. He identified himself as retired Army and added these kits were used prior to soldiers deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan. Let that sink in.”
Gun violence prevention activist Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, blasted the move.
“Texas Gov Greg Abbott is choosing to send DNA kits to schools that parents can use to identify their children’s bodies AFTER they’ve been murdered rather than pass gun safety laws to proactively protect their lives,” she wrote, urging Texans to vote for Democrat Beto O’Rourke in the gubernatorial race.
Last month Everytown, the grassroots “movement of parents, students, survivors, educators, gun owners & concerned citizens fighting to end gun violence and build safer communities,” posted a chart showing the relationship between strong gun laws and lower gun violence.
READ MORE: ‘Taking Us All for Fools’: Critics Decimate Greg Abbott’s Claims and Defense of His Actions in Wake of School Shooting
“The states with the strongest gun laws—like California—have the lowest gun death rates. That’s not a coincidence,” the group, which includes Moms Demand Action, writes.
California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, believed to be mulling a potential 2024 presidential run, also criticized prioritizing DNA test kits over changing gun laws.
“Greg Abbott’s solution to gun violence? Send DNA kits to schools so parents can identify their kids’ bodies AFTER they’ve been shot and killed.”
On its website, Everytown ranks the Lone Star State 34th in the country for “Gun Law Strength,” adds, “Texas has weak gun laws. The state does not require a person to pass a criminal background check before purchasing a firearm from an unlicensed seller. Texas also allows people with carry licenses to carry concealed firearms on college and university campuses. Texas even allows some staff and teachers to carry firearms in K-12 schools.”
“In an average year, 3,647 people die by guns in Texas,” the group notes.
READ MORE: ‘I Apologize for Interrupting Your Press Conference’: Tearful Texas Democrat Urges Greg Abbott to ‘Do Something’ on Guns
Incumbent Governor Abbott is running for re-election against Democrat Beto O’Rourke. FiveThirtyEight reports the Texas Republican is polling about seven points higher than the former U.S. Congressman.
“Some families have found the [DNA test kits] program chilling, considering that police asked parents waiting to find out if their children were slaughtered at Robb Elementary on May 24 to provide DNA samples to help identify the dead,” The Houston Chronicle reports.
“When you put it in the light of Uvalde, it’s one of the most macabre things you could think about,” Bob Sanborn, president of the nonprofit Children at Risk, told The Chronicle.
“Among the countless chilling details to emerge from the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas,” The New York Times reported back in May, “was this: The authorities had asked parents waiting in agony for news about their children to give DNA samples.”
“The request suggests that some of the 19 children who were killed may have been so severely wounded and grouped so closely together that they were difficult to identify, according to experts in medical forensics.”
Confirming the Times’ suggestion, NBC News also reported in May, after the Uvalde mass shooting – the deadliest shooting ever at a Texas public school – that, “Many of the bodies were in bad shape.”
Eulalio Diaz Jr., a justice of the peace forced to act as a medical examiner in Uvalde, “tried to spare the parents as much pain as possible, hoping to positively identify the murdered children through descriptions their parents gave of clothing they wore to school that day, of photos parents showed him.”
“But it wasn’t enough,” NBC added. “The bodies were too shot up. The Texas Rangers ordered DNA swabs of family members.”
Earlier this month Uvalde families joined together, saying, “Greg Abbott has abandoned us.”
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Republican neofascists are playing a dangerous game that will rip America apart
Thom Hartmann April 28, 2022
Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney, while his colleague in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, is on a jihad against the parents of trans children.
This is how fascism progresses through its later stages toward tyranny.
Democracies typically don’t turn into fascist oligarchies by being invaded or losing wars. It usually happens from within, and is driven by an alliance between demagogic politicians, corrupt religious leaders, bigoted street brawlers, and some of the wealthiest people in society.
First, fascists identify groups of people they believe are both vulnerable and sufficiently powerless that they won’t be able to fight back. Typically, these are racial, religious, political or gender/sexuality minorities.
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Enormous efforts go into demonizing the people the fascists have identified; members of the group who’ve committed crimes are heavily publicized, while “think tanks” and fascist allies in the media identify malicious “reasons” for those folks’ “deviance.”
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Efforts by members of the demonized groups to achieve parity or equality in society are characterized as a “theft” of privilege and assets from the majority, legitimizing both verbal, legal, and physical attacks on members of the group.
For example, the billionaire Murdoch family’s top-rated morning show, Fox & Friends, recently wandered into a discussion about white people being “marginalized” by the possibility of our public schools teaching the actual racial history of America.
“[T]hey are not only trying to raise up minorities and make sure the playing field is even,” Brian Kilmeade said, “they’re trying to take down the white culture!”
Kilmeade, in full “White people are the victims!” mode, went on:
“Why are we being marginalized on a daily basis…? And it’s not even subtle! It’s actually out there! It is written in black-and-white!”
It’s played out this way in every democratic country that has fallen to tyranny from within. It’s how it happened in the 1930s in Italy, Germany, Japan and Spain, and today in Hungary, Poland, Egypt, Russia, The Philippines, and Turkey, among others.
More recently, Swanson Food Heir Tucker Carlson went on a rant about the Great Replacement Theory.
After identifying targeted minorities — for today’s GOP that includes Black people, trans kids (and their parents), pregnant women, and Democrats — and encouraging legal and physical violence against them, fascists move to the second major step: seizing enough economic and political power that they can reshape society itself.
This requires bringing in morbidly rich people and enlisting the aid of big business.
So, first, they go after the biggest businesses. One of the biggest businesses in Florida is Disney, so Ron DeSantis tried to get them on his bigoted side. They didn’t go along with it, so now, in typical strongman fashion, DeSantis feels he has to destroy them to save face.
As German industrialist Fritz Thyssen writes in his book I Paid Hitler, he pressured German President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, and then lobbied the Association of German Industrialists, that country’s and era’s version of the US Chamber of Commerce, to donate 3 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party for the 1933 election. It brought Hitler to power.
Hitler’s sales pitch to the German people was that Jews, gays, and socialists had “stabbed Germany in the back” and were trying to “strip” good white Christian Germans of their “rights” and twist society to conform with their “perverted” ideas and lifestyles.
Hitler blamed the 1933 economic crisis on German minorities, Jews and gays, and accused Germany’s second largest political party of complicity with them; the German people went along with him. Once the Nazis took power, they changed election laws in such a way that they would never again lose.
Republicans and rightwing billionaires, of course, are doing much the same thing right now in America. One wonders if they’ll have the retrospective angst that haunted Thyssen until the day he died. He wrote about it in I Paid Hitler:
“I am not a politician, but an industrialist, and an industrialist is always inclined to consider politics a kind of second string to his bow — the preparation for his own particular activity. In a well-ordered country, where the administration is sound, where taxes are reasonable, and the police well organised, he can afford to abstain from politics and to devote himself entirely to business.
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“But in a crisis-ridden state, as Germany was from 1918 to 1933, an industrialist is drawn, willy-nilly, into the vortex of politics. After 1930 the aspirations of German industry may be summed up in one phrase: ‘a sound economy in a strong state.’ This was, I remember, the slogan of a meeting of the Ruhr industrialists in 1931. …“I, too, approved this slogan, 'To surmount the crisis it was necessary to reinforce the authority of the state.’ … I believed that by backing Hitler and his party I could contribute to the reinstatement of real government and of orderly conditions, which would enable all branches of activity — and especially business — to function normally once again.”
Unlike Thyssen, who volunteered to support Hitler’s rise to power with massive financial and business backing, Disney is pushing back against DeSantis’ efforts to remake society in an American neofascist mode.
Unless they soon cave in, Disney’s executives probably won’t one day write in their memoirs, as Thyssen did in his:
“But it is no use crying over spilled milk. The strong state of which I then dreamed had nothing in common with the totalitarian state or, rather, caricature of a state, erected by Hitler and his minions.
“Not for an instant did I imagine that it was possible, one hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution and the proclamation of the Rights of Man, to substitute arbitrary action for law in a great modern country, to strangle the most elementary rights of the citizen, to establish an Asiatic tyranny in the heart of Europe, and to foster anachronistic aspirations of conquest and world dominion.”
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This is not America’s first brush with oligarchic fascism, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. President Franklin Roosevelt and Vice President Henry Wallace struggled with it in the 1930s with Charles Lindberg’s infamous Nazi-aligned America First movement.
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”
As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”
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But Disney refused to use their media platform to advance the fascists’ agenda. It has only, however, slowed them down a bit.
Ultimately, as fascists gain more power and grow bolder, nothing is off the table. This is the threshold we’re approaching today, where they don’t just trash minorities and march through the streets displaying weapons and huge flags, but began asserting justification for violence and even murder.
Alleging crimes against the majority’s children is a fascist favorite, as Hitler charged with his repeated attacks on Jewish teachers, leading 15% of the nation’s teachers and professors (including a guy named Albert Einstein) to flee the country when he began his attacks on education in 1933.
Fascist politicians start alleging the most vile of crimes by the groups they hope to destroy: words like “grooming” roll off their lips with a smarmy ease.
Soon vigilante groups set out to destroy those accused, sometimes politically, sometimes physically.
German Nazis were particularly fond of accusing people they intended to destroy or kill of sexual “crimes.” As Thyssen wrote:
“General von Fritsch’s affair is also a good sample of the peculiar methods used by the Hitler regime. Fritsch was to be ‘liquidated.’ To achieve this, it is said, the head of the Gestapo personally reproached him with practising homosexuality.
“Fritsch, who denied this from the very start, was ordered to call at the chancellery of the Reich, where he was to be unmasked in the presence of the Supreme Leader. … It seems certain that General von Fritsch has subsequently committed suicide. I can at least say that whatever the actual circumstances of his death may have been, he was anxious to die.”
While history usually sides with the victims of fascists, as we’re seeing today with the people Putin is starving to death in Mariupol, that’s small comfort as they confront terror and death.
DeSantis, Abbott and the other Republican neofascists are playing a dangerous game, using Disney as a proxy for the racial and gender minorities they want as whipping boys. It’s a high-stakes political game that has torn societies apart and destroyed millions of lives in the past.
Standing against them are their victims and the Democratic Party, albeit hobbled in their efforts by the perfidy of Manchin and Sinema. This autumn’s elections may well be the last chance for people of good will who believe in American values and eschew fascism to rise in opposition.
Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, regularly double-check your own registration to make it through a voter purge if you live in a Republican-controlled state, and volunteer to help out inside the Democratic Party or through any of the great groups fighting for a more just America.
Time is short, as Fritz Thyssen and Vice President Wallace would tell you were they alive today.
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no lnx
Greg Abbott's border inspections found 'zero drugs, weapons, or any other type of contraband': report
[Dallas, Texas / United States - 05 30 2018: Texas Governor Greg Abbott holding a press conference to unveil his school safety plan following a school shooting at Santa Fe High School (Shutterstock).]
Uriel J. García , James Barragán , Mitchell Ferman and The Texas Tribune April 22, 2022
State troopers ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott to inspect every commercial truck coming from Mexico earlier this month — which clogged international trade with Mexico — found zero drugs, weapons or any other type of contraband, according to data released by the Department of Public Safety to The Texas Tribune.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/21/greg-abbott-texas-border-inspections/.
Earlier this month, Abbott ordered troopers to thoroughly inspect every commercial truck coming from Mexico’s four border states in what he described as an effort to stop illegal drugs and migrants from being smuggled into Texas. His order for increased state inspections was part of his response to the Biden administration’s announcement that it willlift Title 42 — the pandemic-era health order used by federal immigration officials to expel migrants, including asylum-seekers, at the U.S.-Mexico border. The expiration of the order is expected to increase the number of migrants seeking entry to the U.S.
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Over eight days, starting April 8, troopers conducted more than 4,100 inspections of trucks. Troopers didn’t find any contraband but took 850 trucks off the road for various violations related to their equipment. Other truckers were given warnings, and at least 345 were cited for things such as underinflated tires, broken turn signals and oil leaks.
DPS Director Steve McCraw said at a Friday news conference with Abbott that the reason troopers hadn’t found any drugs or migrants in commercial trucks is because drug cartels “don’t like troopers stopping them, certainly north of the border, and they certainly don’t like 100% inspections of commercial vehicles on the bridges. And once that started, we’ve seen a decreased amount of trafficking across bridges — common sense.”
But Adam Isacson, director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group for human rights in the Americas, said it’s not likely cartels stopped the smuggling of drugs because of the state’s inspections. He said many illegal drugs smuggled into the United States are hidden in small compartments or spare tires of people’s vehicles going through international bridges for tourists. He said if smugglers were trying to hide illegal drugs in a commercial truck, it’s most likely federal immigration officials found them before the trucks were directed to the DPS secondary inspections.
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“It just seems odd to me that DPS would be that much of a deterrent for smugglers deciding whether to bring something after already passing through the gauntlet of CBP,” he said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection routinely inspects commercial cargo coming from Mexico for illegal drugs and people being smuggled as soon as truckers cross the international bridges. CBP called Texas’ inspections duplicative and “unnecessary.”
The state inspections created a backlog of 18-wheelers on both sides of the border, with truckers reporting delays of several hours up to a few days, when it usually takes between 20 minutes and a couple of hours for commercial trucks to cross after they’ve been inspected by CBP. The delays also resulted in rotten produce and lost business for grocers.
The state’s inspections at eight commercial bridges that connect Texas cities with Mexican cities in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas ended Friday after Abbott signed agreements with the four Mexican governors that they would increase security measures to prevent the smuggling of drugs and migrants. Abbott has said he would bring back the secondary inspections if the governors’ security initiatives don’t decrease the number of migrants attempting to cross the border.
Abbott said the deals with the four governors were “historic,” calling them an example of how border states can work together on immigration. But three of the four Mexican governors said they will simply continue security measures they put in place before Abbott ordered the state inspections.
Mexico is among the United States’ largest trading partners. The total trade between the two countries amounted to $56.25 billion in February, according to recent government data. Texas’ biggest ports of entry — Port Laredo, Ysleta, Pharr International Bridge, Eagle Pass, El Paso, Brownsville International Bridge and Del Rio International Bridge — accounted for nearly 65% of the total trade between the U.S. and Mexico in 2021.
Reporters James Barragán and Mitchell Ferman contributed to this report.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
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Greg Abbott — Received somewhere in the range $9 million from a tort against a homeowner whose tree branch fell and permanently paralyzed him while was jogging.[7] As Texas attorney general he has supported tort reform that would substantially cap the amount of tort payments.[8]
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/texas-history-book/
cdv
In the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney proclaimed that Black people have "no rights that the white man is bound to respect." Today's Jim Crow Republican Party, and the white right more broadly, have taken the spirit of those words and updated them for the 21st century, effectively by arguing that "white people are not bound to respect historical truth or established facts — at least not as they pertain to Black and brown people in America".
As the next step in their war against multiracial democracy, the Republican Party and its allies have launched a moral panic about "critical race theory." Of course, their version of "critical race theory" is a type of racial bogeyman or psychological projection, a function of white racial paranoia about the "browning of America" and the threat of "white genocide."
Facts do not matter in the right-wing echo chamber. It is of no importance that the white right's version of "critical race theory" has nothing to do with the scholarly paradigm of the same name.
As the truism holds, history is written by the victors. To that end, in dozens of states across the country, the white right is engaging in an Orwellian campaign of rewriting school curricula to prevent the teaching of "critical race theory" -- which in practice means stopping any serious engagement with America's real and often uncomfortable history of racism and white supremacy.
For example, in Florida, a law was recently passed mandating a survey of students and faculty in public colleges and universities to determine their political beliefs. Of course, Florida has also banned the teaching of "critical race theory."
Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, perhaps the single most influential voice on the white right, recently suggested that cameras should be placed in classrooms to ensure that no teachers will deploy "critical race theory" or other facts and arguments deemed to be "unpatriotic."
The Republican-controlled Texas Senate recently passed a bill eliminating a requirement that the history of the civil rights movement and other human rights struggles be taught in public schools. The bill also removed a condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan from course requirements as well.
As Yahoo News reports, the requirements removed from the state's curriculum include two speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Latino labor organizers Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and any mention of Thomas Jefferson's long-term relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenage child who bore six of his children. The bill bars any use of the New York Times' 1619 Projectand "prohibits teaching that slavery was part of the 'true' founding of the United States" and removes the requirement to study the "history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong."
This Republican legislation has been met with widespread outrage. But that reaction should just be the beginning. The next step involves doing the harder work of understanding why so many other (mostly white) Americans actually believe that "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history should be banned. Understanding these beliefs and motivations is essential to defeating American neofascism and its white supremacist social and political project.
Many Americans have been propagandized by their schools, news media, the internet, churches and other social institutions to believe in a large set of interlocking lies and myths about the country's past and present. To intervene against these lies often causes emotional pain and/or narcissistic injury to those who hold such beliefs.
This dynamic is especially powerful for those who are emotionally, psychologically, financially and politically invested in defending and protecting white privilege and white people's control over almost every aspect of American life. In that context, the personal truly is political: Whiteness, as a concept and a social force, has become linked at an individual level to the maintenance of white power.
How does this right-wing fantasy machine work? The Root has exhaustively documented how some of America's most widely used history textbooks misrepresent the real history of the color line and distort such topics as chattel slavery, the Civil War, the civil rights movement and social injustice more generally, through the use of what sociologist Joe Feagin has called the "white racial frame."
Michael Harriot offers this analysis:
So when Mitch McConnell and 38 Republican senators sent a letter to the secretary of education decrying the ghastly prospect of white students having to learn actual facts about slavery, it was not unexpected. For centuries, this country's schools have perpetuated a whitewashed version of history that either erases or reduces the story of Black America down to a B-plot in the American script. It's why they hate Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project and anything factual — because the white-centric interpretation of our national past is so commonly accepted, white people have convinced themselves that anything that varies from the Caucasian interpretation must be a lie. …
This is why they oppose expanding the historiography of our national story. American schools have never taught a version of history that wasn't racialized. But, apparently, it's perfectly fine if the racial narrative skews toward whiteness. They can't be opposed to learning a different historical perspective because they never learned history; they were spoonfed fiction in bite-sized morsels.
To be fair, it's understandable why they are so adamant about what they believe in.
Imagine you are a white man. Now imagine what it's like going through 12 years of school, four years of college, graduate school and an entire career that made you one of the most powerful people on the planet. Now imagine a group of Black journalists, led by a Black woman, told you that you don't know shit.
To that point, the right-wing echo chamber consistently repeats neo-Confederate "Lost Cause" myths, such as the oft-repeated lie that the Civil War was fought over "states' rights" rather than white-on-Black chattel slavery.
The right obsessively depicts the Democrats as "the party of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow and slavery". This is a deliberate distortion of history because the pro-slavery, pro-segregation faction of the Democratic Party became solid Republicans after the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
Right-wing propagandists also love to claim that Martin Luther King Jr. was a "Republican," or at least espoused Republican values. This is a ludicrous allegation: In contemporary terms King was a democratic socialist or progressive who opposed racism, poverty, military adventurism and injustice of all kinds. King would have viewed the modern-day conservative movement as a great force for evil in American society and the world.
Black conservative propagandists play an important role in the right-wing echo chamber, validating racist fantasies that slavery was a "gift" to Black people because it brought them to America. In this twisted perception of history, chattel slavery is understood as a "necessary evil" because it gave Black people Christianity and taught them the value of "hard work".
These same Black conservatives love to repeat the vicious lie that the Democratic Party is a type of "plantation." In reality, the plantations of the antebellum South were prison camps, charnel houses and places of torture, rape, suffering and death. Black conservative propagandists frequently announce that they are special and uniquely capable of "thinking for themselves," as compared to the vast majority of Black people who support the Democratic Party and are therefore deemed to be ignorant or uninformed.
The campaign against "critical race theory" — and against teaching America's real history — must be understood as part of a larger fascist strategy of attacking public schools and other institutions of learning with the aim of creating compliant followers and a public that is not equipped to participate in democracy — or to defend it.
This plan involves placing white supremacists, QAnon conspiracists, Trump supporters and other right-wing extremists — to the degree those categories of people can be separated — on local school boards and library advisory councils, banning "controversial" books, and the surveillance or intimidation of teachers deemed too "liberal" or suspected of "politicizing" the classroom, i.e., by refusing to teach right-wing dogma and other lies.
The fascist assault on education and critical thinking also involves think tanks, right-wing activists and advocacy groups, along with a network of wealthy funders committed to remaking American society to fit their racist, theocratic and plutocratic vision.
The Texas Republicans' attempt to literally whitewash the Ku Klux Klan out of American history is so ridiculous that it approaches parody. That doesn't make such historical erasure and distortion any less dangerous. Those dangers are further amplified by the crisis of democracy caused by the Jim Crow Republicans and ascendant neofascist movement.
As historian Timothy Snyder warned in a recent essay in the New York Times:
Democracy requires individual responsibility, which is impossible without critical history. It thrives in a spirit of self-awareness and self-correction. Authoritarianism, on the other hand, is infantilizing: We should not have to feel any negative emotions; difficult subjects should be kept from us. Our memory laws amount to therapy, a talking cure. In the laws' portrayal of the world, the words of white people have the magic power to dissolve the historical consequences of slavery, lynchings and voter suppression. Racism is over when white people say so.
We start by saying we are not racists. Yes, that felt nice. And now we should make sure that no one says anything that might upset us. The fight against racism becomes the search for a language that makes white people feel good. The laws themselves model the desired rhetoric. We are just trying to be fair. We behave neutrally. We are innocent.
When viewed in the aggregate, these attacks on "critical race theory" and the teaching of America's real history echo some of the worst aspects of the country's past. In his book "Trouble in Mind", historian Leon Litwack details how history was taught during the Jim Crow reign of terror:
The history to which Black children were exposed in the classroom and the primers made a virtual gospel of the superiority of Anglo-Saxon institutions and ways of thinking and acting…. What little they learned of their own history consisted often of disparaging caricatures of Black people as the least civilized of the races — irresponsible, thoughtless, foolish, childlike people, satisfied with their lowly place in American life, incapable of self-control and self-direction. The history of Black people was a history of submission gladly endured and of services faithfully rendered. Transported from the darkness of heathen Africa to the civilized and Christian New World, grateful slaves found contentment and happiness…. The treatment of emancipation depicted Blacks passively waiting for Massa' Lincoln to strike off their shackles. And Reconstruction saw the enthronement of Black ignorance and inexperience, with the Ku Klux Klan in some account redeeming Anglo-Saxon civilization from alien rule. The history lessons taught in public schools were calculated to produce patriotic citizens, albeit with a distinctive southern bias.
The Jim Crow Republicans and the white right view this approach to American history as admirable, something to be resuscitated from the dustbin of the country's past.
In the self-serving stories told by the Ku Klux Klan, that terrorist organization had noble origins, represented "Christian values," did charity work and helped the poor, served the community by dealing with drunks and other miscreants, and protected "white families" as well as the "good Blacks". This is the fake history that the Jim Crow Republicans want to see taught to America's young people.
The neofascist movement understands that if it wins the battle over the teaching of the past, it can in turn control the future. In total, the right wing's moral panic over "critical race theory" resembles the kind of hearts-and-minds indoctrination favored by the great villains of history. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler and Goebbels would be proud to see their legacy continued.
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no lnx
The corruption that overwhelmed the GOP has reached a crisis point — and it's killing people
Greg Abbott speaking at FreePac, hosted by FreedomWorks, in Phoenix, Arizona, Gage Skidmore
Thom Hartmann and Independent Media Institute June 16, 2021
Texas is showing us all how the corruption that has overwhelmed the GOP has reached a crisis point, and it's killing people.
President Dwight Eisenhower said, "If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power."
Sadly, Eisenhower's Republican Party is now there: they haven't governed to protect or help the people at the federal or state level since the Reagan Revolution. Today, instead, they simply engage in a corrupt form of political performance art while stuffing their pockets with corporate money.
Today's example: Greg Abbott.
Corrupt Texas Governor Greg Abbott is the poster child for corrupt Republicans' sellout to the fossil fuel industry. And the consequence of that will almost certainly kill hundreds of Texans this summer. But Abbott really, really doesn't want you to be thinking about that.
His latest scam to divert Texans' attention away from this malfeasance is to proudly declare that Texas is asserting its rights under the 10th Amendment to reject oversight or even advice from the federal government.
Texas, like most red states, takes in more federal dollars then they send to Washington DC; instead of merely calling Governor Abbott "corrupt" it's probably also time to call him a "welfare queen," a phrase much beloved of Republicans, at least when they apply it to Black women.
But the real "welfare" that Abbott and the whole collection of corrupt Texas Republicans have been living off for decades is the cash the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created pour down their throats every year by way of campaign contributions and dark money support.
For example, back in 2014 the good citizens of Denton County Texas, sick of air and water pollution from fracking, passed a ballot initiative banning it in their county by over 60%.
Texas' sold-out Republicans immediately responded with House Bill 40, which Governor Abbott enthusiastically signed, that "gives the state exclusive jurisdiction over oil and gas operations and prohibits local municipalities from creating ordinances that ban, limit, or regulate oil and gas operations…"
That's the Texas Republicans' motto: "Screw the people; we just do what's necessary to help out the fossil fuel billionaires who own us."
Back in 1999, then-Governor George W. Bush, himself of fossil-fuel multimillionaire, separated almost all of the Texas power grid from those of neighboring states to avoid federal oversight. He put the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) in charge of the largely then-privatized grid.
Bush called it, "The nation's most extensive experiment in electrical deregulation."
It turned out to be an extraordinary expensive and deadly experiment, one that burdens Texas to this day.
As The Wall Street Journal noted a few months ago: "Those deregulated Texas residential consumers paid $28 billion more for their power since 2004 than they would have paid at the rates charged to the customers of the state's traditional utilities, according to the Journal's analysis of data from the federal Energy Information Administration."
That money, of course, went mostly into the pockets of wealthy investors, power company CEOs, and filled the campaign coffers of Texas Republican politicians. It certainly didn't do much to reinforce or make the state's power generation systems or distribution grid more robust.
The result was that this past winter when climate change sent a massive cold wave down into Texas, an estimated 800 people died and the state suffered billions in property damage.
Individual Texans and small businesses are now picking up the lion's share of that tab, of course. It's the Republican way, after all: privatize profits, spread them amongst corrupt Republican politicians, and stick the public with the costs.
Now NOAA is forecasting one of the hottest and driest summers in the history of Texas because of the climate crisis, and already, with temperatures this week only in the 80s and 90s, ERCOT and Abbott have had to ask Texans to keep their air conditioners set above 78 to keep the grid from failing.
Abbott — with much pomp and ceremony — issued an executive order banning private and public entities from requiring masks to protect against a deadly pandemic, but he sure seems fine telling people they can't enjoy their air-conditioning so he can keep the fossil-fuel money flowing into Texas' awesomely corrupt Republican Party.
The prospect of enduring brutal heat and facing the probability of massive power blackouts throughout the summer is not endearing Abbott and his Republican cronies to average Texan voters. As a result, Abbott has come up with a flurry of activity to make it look like he's actually doing something.
As mentioned, he just declared the state "sovereign" under the 10th amendment, as if that were a thing. When he announced it on Twitter, he was buried in ridicule and questions from Texans about what this has to do with making sure their lights don't go out this summer.
Burrowing deeper and deeper into the warm embrace of fossil fuel billionaires, the Texas legislature just passed SB 13, which "would require the State of Texas and its entities (including state pension funds and the state's huge K-12 school endowment) to cut ties with companies that refuse to invest in fossil fuels."
That's right. If your company wants to do business with the state of Texas, or have them invest in your company's stocks or bonds, you damn well better make sure that you're throwing money at the fossil fuel industry or at least own a huge pile of their stock.
As Indivisible Texas notes: "SB 13 creates an intricate system of lists, reports, and oversight of companies that prefer not to transact with fossil fuel companies for whatever reason. This bill actually treats business interactions with certain business sectors in the state as it does enemies of the United States!"
Corruption like this is not a joke; it's already cost Texas ratepayers $28 billion and 800 lives, and more is on the way. And the Texas Republican politicians' response is just to make it harder for Texans to vote.
In state after state, Americans are seeing how the GOP has transformed itself from a legitimate political party into an arm of giant corporations and the billionaires they have created, all while rigging the system to keep themselves in office.
In some states the GOP is mostly dancing with the fossil fuel industry that's destroying our climate and poisoning us; in others it's the health insurance or big drug industries they're helping to bankrupt and addict Americans, or the student or payday loan industries that are destroying the American Dream.
The gun industry is making billions while America experiences daily mass shootings that Republicans refuse to do anything about.
In their wake every year are over 30,000 gun deaths, 500,000 bankruptcies because somebody in the family got sick, young people who can't escape debt for decades if ever, and a landscape littered with destroyed lives and suicides.
None of these things are happening in any other developed nation. But no other developed nation has a major political party that has become a serial killer of its nation's people and governs like the Mafia.
The GOP has become, as Eisenhower warned, "merely a conspiracy to seize power." And the tragic result is a weakened, potholed, polluted and impoverished America.
If the party can't reform itself, it needs to go the way of the Whigs and be put out of its misery. The American people — even voters who consider themselves Republicans — deserve better.
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Is white supremacy a rising problem in the US?
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/billionaire/
As we're struggling to recover from Trump's half-million unnecessary Covid deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the sedition was among Republicans in Congress around January 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe elections and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.
This article was originally published at The Hartmann Report
And they're having considerable success.
About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to "do what is right" when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1960s presidency.
In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It's so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the "tyranny" of having to wear masks during a pandemic, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.
This is no accident; it's the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America's richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, "[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar fossil fuel empire, a situation akin to the "heroic" brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged:
If you don't have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.
If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don't have a union, you make more money.
If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.
If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you've made.
If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you've made.
So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?
Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible "invisible hand" of the marketplace.
Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the "government is evil" bandwagon ever since.
And it's largely worked, if the "trust in government" statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.
Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.
Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was "suffering under" in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, "A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included."
"How can you handle that?" asked the host, incredulous.
The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.
A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.
The reporter went for a third try. "Why don't you lead a revolt against those high taxes?" he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, "I don't want to be a rich man in a poor country."
There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it's perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.
They've funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the "deregulate, cut, denigrate" line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.
And over and over again, they've been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we're seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony "audit" to further erode Americans' faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it's all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.
Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the Covid crisis a few months ago had this headline: "With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of Voters Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans." Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they're opposing President Biden's efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.
As this nation recovers from a deadly pandemic that — unnecessarily — killed more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing hate groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let's remember how this all came about. And all for a few extra pieces of gold.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gop-corporations/
There's been a lot of talk lately about fascism, generally in the context of Republicans denying people their right to vote or Donald Trump sending an armed mob to murder five people at the U.S. Capitol to try to install him as America's first strongman dictator.
Indeed, authoritarian governance is a major aspect of fascism. But there's another piece to the puzzle, and it is playing out right now across America, and getting almost no coverage whatsoever.
It's when giant corporations are able to control government and thus stop things like a national healthcare system, rational gun control laws, free college, or even the tiniest tax on carbon. When they're able to push through "criminal justice reform" that makes it nearly impossible to prosecute corporate CEOs when their companies kill workers, consumers, or even poison entire communities.
It's when they don't do it through presenting strong and defendable ideas in the public realm and before Congress, but by pouring cash into the pockets of individual politicians and their parties.
It's when corporations and the very rich have seized control of the political process through the use of their considerable economic power, after having used that power to change laws so they can legally buy politicians.
When government gives corporations this core power to write laws, and, in exchange, corporations facilitate government power to suppress dissent and marginalize non-fascist political parties, a country finds itself on the edge of classical fascism.
The word fascism comes from the Roman fasces, a bundle of sticks with a rope around it, typically adorned with a hatchet on the top. There's one carved into the podium in the United States Senate, an homage to the ancient Roman Republic which originated it and partly inspired our Constitution.
The idea is that a single stick can easily be broken, but a bundle of sticks is almost impossible to break. Similarly, a single state may be vulnerable, but a collection of states, united together, is unbreakable.
But the Roman fasces, although that symbol was used throughout history as a symbol of the ancient Roman Republic, took on a completely different meaning in the late 1920s when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini derived from it the word fascism.
To him, fascism met something quite different than just the strength of a united country. It meant the literal merger of corporate and state interests, ultimately facilitating a strongman authoritarian government. Corporations and the government becoming interpenetrated and intertwined, ruling the country together, with a "tough guy" in charge.
The "tough guy" or authoritarian leader would then shower his own beneficence on the corporations that funded his political power.
Mussolini was so enthusiastic about this that he declared the essential merger of state and corporate power. As he said in The Labour Charter (Promulgated by the Grand Council of Fascism on April 21, 1927, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale, April 3, 1927, p. 133):
The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organized in their respective associations, circulate within the State.
Giant corporations across Italy competed for Mussolini's favor, and for the government contracts that could doubly flow from it. Not to mention the political power that could grant profits, tax cuts, and immunity from being held responsible for everything from industrial accidents causing the death of workers to deadly pollution killing entire communities.
Today, as a substantial number of Republican politicians are actively working to subvert democracy and establish a merger of corporate and strongman rule, what Mussolini called fascism, those politicians are also being supported and encouraged by large numbers of major American corporations.
In exchange for that support, particularly during the Trump administration but also on a state-by-state basis where Republicans control state governments, those corporations get everything from tax cuts to assistance in avoiding unions to a pass on pollution or even corporate malfeasance that kills people, like we just saw with the for-profit corporate power grid in Texas.
We are moving from the early technical dimensions of fascism to the true realization of Mussolini's vision.
If these Republican politicians and the corporations supporting them are successful, and a Republican strongman like Trump or his imitators (Scott, Hawley, Cruz, Cotton, etc.) again achieves the presidency, we will fully enter an American version of that which Mussolini created in Italy in 1927.
Over 120 American corporations vowed, after the January 6 insurrection, that they would no longer make campaign contributions to those Republicans who fought certifying the 2020 election.
But the lure of fascism for a corporation is extraordinary.
AT&T, CIGNA Health, Ford Motor, and Pfizer have broken their commitment not to support insurrectionists. More will, no doubt, follow soon.
The benefits of fascism include huge profits for the company and its stockholders; massive payouts to senior executives and members of the board of directors; not just tax breaks but actual subsidies with taxpayer's dollars of a whole variety of activities including R&D and even free land; complete immunity for the executives when their decisions destroy communities or even kill people; and a steady flow, back-and-forth, between government regulatory agencies and the very corporations regulated by them.
It shouldn't surprise us, therefore, that as long as Republicans are offering this fantastic dream world to America's corporations, those companies might toss out a few news releases saying they're not going to support fascistic Republican politicians, but that that seemingly moral stand would collapse almost instantly.
As Daily Beast investigative reporting found, corroborating the groundbreaking reporting that Judd Legum has been doing for weeks on his popular.info website, at the very least AT&T, CIGNA Health, Ford Motor, and Pfizer have broken their commitment not to support insurrectionists.
More will, no doubt, follow soon.
But how could they do otherwise? Modern corporations are an altogether different animal from those in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s when corporations went out of their way to be, or to at least seem to be, good citizens of the community and the nation.
The Reagan administration in the 1980s essentially re-wrote the rules of corporate governance.
It used to be the corporations had a responsibility to their local community, to their workers, to their shareholders, and to their customers. Their senior executives and Board of Directors had a responsibility to the institution of the company itself. Prior to 1980, the average CEO in a large American corporation had worked in that company for about 30 years, typically climbing from the bottom to the top. And the average CEO only earned 30 times what the most poorly paid employee made.
That was the norm in America up until the 1980s. But the Reagan administration, through a series of administrative law changes, re-wrote those rules.
They adopted an idea that had been kicking around among rightwing cranks like Robert Bork and Milton Friedman for years, that had been scorned by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and even President Richard Nixon.
It was that a corporation has only one, single obligation to only one, single entity: to increase profits and thus dividends and its share price for its shareholders.
The Supreme Court, stacked with corporate shills by bought-off politicians, has since ratified that new perspective in a series of decisions peripheral to it, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America. CF
So now corporations don't have to answer to their communities, their employees, their customers or even the idea of the permanence of the institution. All they have to answer to is profits for stockholders.
And the stockholders frankly don't give a rat's ass about how the corporation is run or what it does, so long as it keeps cranking out cash every quarter so the dividend checks continue to arrive. Which is why corporate CEOs now make over 300 times what their lowest-paid employee makes, and in some sectors it's thousands of times more.
As many of us pointed out back in the 1980s, and I wrote about at length in my book Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People, this was almost certain to cause American business and the American government to reconfigure themselves along the lines of the classical, Mussolini definition of fascism. It would lead to the merger of corporate and state interests, and the end of electoral democracy.
America does have a serious fascism problem, but it goes way beyond the kinds of authoritarianism displayed by people like Donald Trump, Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, or Tom Cotton. It goes deep, now, into the very structure of corporate America.
If America is to survive as a democratic republic, we not only must repudiate strongman authoritarianism; we also must change federal rules regarding corporate governance to repudiate shareholder primacy, block fascism, and thus restore corporate behavior to something resembling sanity and responsibility.
This piece initially appeared on The Hartmann Report.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/gop-war-on-democracy/
Former Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney being booed in his own home state raise an urgent question: Are the Redcoats back?
The Republican party has now introduced over 300 pieces of legislation designed to make it more difficult for American citizens to participate in the process of selecting their representatives, the core function of a democratic republic.
They've also proposed or passed numerous laws criminalizing protest and dissent, primary American values written into the First Amendment, and given a "get out of jail free" card to people who kill protesters.
Today's Republican party does not believe in democracy or the core idea on which this nation was founded:
"That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" and "that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…"
As we see with their support of Trump's Big Lie, they have a serious problem with that "consent of the governed" part of the Declaration of Independence. And they're pretty sketchy about that whole human "rights" thing.
If it seems like America is re-fighting the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, it's because there's a sizeable group of rightwing Americans who say that's what they think they're doing.
In both of those past wars, one group of Americans believed in the ideal of democracy and a republic deriving its authority from the will and consent of its people. On the other side, there were people who believed that democracy was a dangerous experiment and a grave mistake.
During the Revolutionary War the anti-democracy folks were called Tories or Loyalists, because they were loyal to the British king and believed that the best form of government was a kingdom, and that letting average people participate in democratic governance would lead to disaster.
That was solidly a third, perhaps even half, of the white people then living in North America: they were willing to fight and die to keep America part of the United Kingdom.
Those who opposed democracy on this continent had a lot of history on their side.
For most of the 7,000 years of recorded human history at that point, governments had been run either by kings who seized power through violence, or priestly theocrats who claimed that their authority to rule came from God. (In most cases, regardless of who ended up on top, there was an unholy alliance between the two.)
The British United Kingdom was just the latest, in 1776, in a long series of kingdoms that ruled every part of Europe; the Greek experiment with democracy was 3000 years old at that time, and the Roman experiment with a republican form of government had failed almost 2000 years earlier.
There were a lot of reasons back then to think that a democratic republic would be a terrible mistake.
The main one was that it hadn't worked in thousands of years, and the ancient Greek and Roman experiments were considered by many — most, actually — to have been failed experiments.
People believed so strongly either in the Loyalist necessity of a royal family, or the Founders' hope of a people engaged in self-rule, that families were literally torn apart, brother killing brother, neighbors turning firearms against each other.
By the time of the Civil War, 80 years later, there was still a debate about whether democracy was anything more than some kind of liberal, airy-fairy idea that really didn't work out all that well.
But this time, those Americans who took up arms against democracy were not fighting on behalf of a church or a king. They were fighting to support the rich, the oligarchs of the deep South.
As I lay out in detail in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, between 1820 and 1860 the South underwent a radical consolidation of wealth and property.
The invention of the Cotton Gin and its adoption in the early 1820s allowed the few plantations wealthy enough to buy one to effectively wipe out their smaller competitors and buy up their land.
As a result, by 1860 virtually all of the most productive land, wealth and political power of the South was consolidated in the hands of just a few thousand families.
They did not believe in democracy either; they declared war on America specifically to end democracy and establish a continent-wide oligarchy: rule by the rich in an oligarchic police state as the South had become.
The North won and democracy prevailed, but the idea of oligarchy survived and has been persistent throughout American history.
This is what the Republican party now represents: Oligarchy.
Rule by the rich and ignoring "the consent of the governed."
The suppression of dissent, the oppression of minorities, and replacing the ballot box with the iron fist of a police state run of, by and for the wealthy few.
And they're pushing us there really hard and really fast:
A political network run by a group of right-wing billionaires has a larger budget and more employees than the entire Republican party.
A family of billionaire oligarchs from Australia crank democracy-hating propaganda into the American political bloodstream nearly every day on cable television and in print.
Voices openly denigrating democracy and promoting hate and intolerance — the hallmarks of oligarchy — are on local radio and television in every American city every single day, and dominate the Internet.
The single largest source of threats and murders by terrorists in America are today committed by white-supremacist right-wingers who hate and fear the idea of a pluralistic, democratic society.
Tragically, for the third time in our history, Americans who believe in democracy find themselves again having to defend themselves against Americans who don't.
Several of these hard-right groups have openly declared their intention to start a second American Civil War.
They say they want to see Americans killing each other in the name of white supremacy and rule by the rich, and some have followed their suggestion.
They declare their loyalty to a white-supremacist real estate oligarch from New York, get their news from Australian and Ukrainian oligarchs, and have embraced an ideology championed by Germans in the 1930s.
They even adorn themselves in red and wear funny hats like the British loyalists did in revolutionary times.
The Biden presidency represents America's third, and perhaps final, chance to prove democracy is not merely an idealistic fantasy.
If his administration and the Democrats in Congress can succeed in conquering the coronavirus, putting the American economy back on track, and rebuilding the civil society that 40 years of Reaganism has so devastated, American democracy — and, indeed, democracy around the world — may well endure and even grow.
But Republicans are doing everything they can to keep that from happening, from discouraging vaccination and public health measures, to sabotaging our election systems, to amplifying their rhetoric of hate and terror across multiple media platforms.
When "moderate" voices within their ranks, like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney, dare pop their heads up, the majority of the Republican Party viciously attacks them.
Dissent is no longer allowed in the GOP.
Authoritarianism has prevailed.
Oligarchy has completely seized the party.
These, as Thomas Paine (a fervent believer in democracy) said, "are the times that try men's souls."
Long before actual conflict broke out, Paine wrote: "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered…"
We must not let the right-wing Redcoat/Redhat terrorists, who have openly proclaimed their goal of Americans killing Americans in an ideological and racial war, prevail.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/mcconnell-destroy-gop/?rs=182
no lnx
Why Mitch McConnell is about to destroy the GOP
Thom Hartmann and Independent Media Institute May 05, 2021
Nobody's asking, "Why?"
Just like he did with the Covid rescue bill a few months ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just said that there will not be one single Republican vote in support of President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan.
Why would McConnell do this?
Why would he give away any bargaining leverage the GOP might have?
Why would he essentially encourage Democrats to make the legislation as expansive, effective and popular as possible? And then let them get all the credit for it?
After all, now that the Democrats know there's no possibility of any Republican votes, there's no need for them to negotiate with any GOP senators. There's no need for Democrats to worry about their Republican colleagues' feelings, thoughts, concerns or even ask their opinions.
That simple reality has been noted by a number of commentators.
But nobody is asking the bigger question: "Why would a professional, lifelong politician and master tactician like Mitch McConnell make such a huge mistake?"
I believe the answer is that McConnell does not think he's making a mistake. He thinks he's right. He thinks he's going to win.
I believe he has completely deluded himself. He has bought his own BS. And it won't be the first time senior Republican leadership has done this and then destroyed the GOP in the process.
This is a guy, after all, who spent decades proclaiming Reaganomics and supply-side economics.
He's probably asserted a thousand times that when taxes on rich people are cut and government spending goes down, good things will happen to the American economy. He's repeatedly assured his voters that when unions are destroyed the working class prospers.
He's embraced and endorsed 40 years of de-funding and ignoring America's infrastructure, even to the point of frustrating Trump's own infrastructure plan attempts. Over and over again, when proposed by Clinton and Obama, McConnell has suggested that rebuilding our country at the expense of taxing rich people would create an economic disaster.
For most Americans, forty years of experience with these theories that McConnell's been promoting have proven that they're largely crackpot BS. They're fantasies sold to the American public by billionaires and the think-tanks they fund, amplified by right-wing radio and media, to keep the billionaire's taxes down, their companies deregulated and unions out of their workplaces.
But they've been sold so aggressively — from the efforts in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by people like Hayek, von Misis and Milton Friedman, to Ronald Reagan and the institutional Republican party from 1980 to this day — that many Republicans actually do believe them.
Particularly multimillionaires — who hang out with billionaires — like McConnell.
And McConnell's is not alone in this belief, even among significant Republican figures.
I regularly invite conservatives on my radio/TV program to defend propositions like those above, and there are several who I've come to know personally, and I know for a fact, that they actually believe these things.
Reaganomics hasn't worked out, they say, because it hasn't really been tried.
There's been too much government spending clouding things. Taxes have never really been low enough. There's never been a true libertarian experiment in America.
If we want to see if these theories actually work, they say, first we have to do away with Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, food stamps, public schools, public health departments and the whole plethora of government-supported institutions. Those things, they say, have so muddled up and distorted our economic systems that partial measures like partial deregulation and occasional tax cuts promoted by Republicans over the last 40 years haven't had the success that they could have had in a "pure free-market economy."
These people, who I know personally, are not saying what they're saying because their paychecks depend upon it (although that is true of a few others that I know and have met in the media). They're saying it because they believe it.
They studied it in college from Econ professors whose chairs were funded by right-wing billionaires and conservative foundations. They've read it over and over again in conservative books and magazines, and on conservative websites. They've been hearing it preached from the highest towers of conservatism their entire lives.
If Mitch McConnell is at all like them, he believes it's true, too. He believes that rebuilding America using tax dollars from people earning over $400,000 a year will produce a disaster. He's internalized that message.
Another clue that Mitch McConnell and many of his Republican colleagues actually believe this stuff was revealed at last weekend's Utah Republican party meeting, where Mitt Romney was booed.
It's another sign that the ideology has taken deep hold and spread in the party. It's become more important than the good of the party itself, as happened in 1964.
If Mitch McConnell is a true believer, he may well be in the "true believer mold" of Barry Goldwater.
If so, this is the second time this has happened in the Republican party in my lifetime. And it may presage the exact same kind of disaster that Barry Goldwater brought down upon the party in 1964.
I was only 13 at the time, but I remember watching the 1964 Republican convention with my dad when Nelson Rockefeller got up and gave a speech calling for moderation, compromise and a commitment to do what was best for the nation.
Referring to Goldwater and the right-wing true-believers who followed him, much like Mitt Romney referred to Trump and MAGAs, Rockefeller said, "These extremists feed off fear, hate and terror. They encourage disunity." He was booed off the stage, as you can see in this short clip.
Nelson Rockefeller denounces Republican "extremists" at the 1964 Republican National Convention
youtu.be]
Then Barry Goldwater stepped up to the microphone and loudly proclaimed:
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!!"
Barry Goldwater: Extremism In The Defence of Liberty Is No Vice
youtu.be]
He brought down the house. The standing ovation lasted for minutes. They really believed him.
Prior to Goldwater's 1964 candidacy, the Republican party of Dwight Eisenhower had been a pretty moderate place (including VP Nixon's 1960 race against JFK).
Eisenhower advocated unionization and bragged about how many new union members had joined during his presidency. In 1956, when he ran for reelection, he highlighted how he'd helped increase the number of people on Social Security.
In his farewell address he prayed — literally prayed (14:55 on the recording) — for world peace, in the same speech he used to warn us about the Military-Industrial Complex.
Eisenhower Farewell Address (Best Quality) - 'Military Industrial Complex' WARNING
youtu.be]
But then the True Believers took over the GOP — to this day.
Goldwater went on to lose to LBJ in a massive landslide, and McConnell may well be leading his own party in a very similar direction.
Goldwater believed what he was saying. I've read both his autobiographies and there's no doubt in my mind.
I can't say that I am as much of a student of Mitch McConnell as I was of Barry Goldwater back in 1964 when, along with my dad, I went door to door for him in that presidential campaign.
But the first possible and most rational explanation for Mitch McConnell openly stating in advance that there will not be a single Republican vote for Biden's plan is that McConnell thinks if Biden's plan passes it will create a disaster.
He thinks that inflation will spike, the national debt will lead to some terrible national default, and/or the stock market along with the entire economy will go in the tank.
After all, that's what he's been preaching for 40 years. How hard is it to imagine that he's come to believe his own sales pitch?
Sadly, for Mitch, all the empirical evidence indicates that his belief is just as misplaced as were Goldwater's fears of communists in the State Department and the viability of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
The Republican party tried a very similar shtick back in 1920, when Warren Harding was elected President on a platform of dropping the 91% top tax rate down to 25%, deregulating industry and privatizing most government functions. He won that election, and kept those promises.
It led to the "Roaring Twenties" — a time when the very rich got very much richer and working people got screwed — and then straight to the stock market crash of 1929 and what was called for a generation the "Republican Great Depression."
Perhaps McConnell doesn't know the history. Perhaps he thinks that era was an anomaly, or an incomplete experiment, or there were other factors that caused the crash.
Or, if you've read this far, there's one other possibility worth considering. Perhaps McConnell's trying to implode the party to purge it of Trump.
It's pretty far out, but maybe he's letting folks trash Romney and Cheney and the rational few left in the party so it'll fall so low in the 2022 election that Trump will be discredited and purged from the party himself.
That possibility, though, is a stretch. It still appears that the only reasonable explanation for Mitch McConnell refusing in advance to go along with anything Biden is proposing that might help America is that he truly believes that, at the end of the day, Biden's plans will be a disaster and he wants to have no part of them.
He's wrong, but — in either case — he's certainly not lacking in conviction.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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trojan horse for long awaited tort reform?! never waste a crisis?!
Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans without any consequence.
Mitch took you and me hostage back in May, when the House of Representatives passed the HEROES act that would have funded state and local governments and provided unemployed workers with an ongoing weekly payment.
Mitch refused to even allow the Senate to discuss the HEROES Act until or unless the legislation also legalized corporations killing their workers and customers. To this day, he refuses to let it even be discussed in the Senate.
We've seen companies fire people for refusing to take their lives in their hands, executives organize betting pools on which employees are going to die first, and companies lying openly to their workers and customers about the dangers of Covid-19.
Mitch McConnell wants to protect them all. Even worse, his immunity can extend well beyond the pandemic and sets up a process that could put corporations above the law permanently, across every community in America, in ways that state and local governments can never defy.
While Republicans have fought against raising the minimum wage or letting workers unionize for over 100 years, what McConnell is doing now is giving corporations the ultimate right: the right to kill their employees and customers with impunity.
And McConnell's holding your local police and fire departments, public schools, and state healthcare programs hostage in exchange for his corporate immunity.
This is beyond immoral. This is ghastly, and should have been at the top of every news story in America for the past six months. But many of the corporations that are looking forward to complete supremacy over their workers include the giant corporations that own our media.
America has suffered for over 40 years under Reaganism's neoliberal mantra, picked up from Milton Friedman, that when corporations focus exclusively on profit an "invisible hand" will guide them to do what's best for people and communities. It's a lie.
This is an assault on workers' rights, but, even greater, it's a corporate assault on human rights. McConnell is saying that a corporation's right to kill its workers and customers is more important than the lives of human beings.
As unemployment benefits are running out, evictions loom, small businesses are dying left and right, millions of families have been thrown into crisis and more than 10 million Americans have lost their health insurance, McConnell continues to hold us all hostage.
It's time to fight back. If corporate media continues to refuse to discuss McConnell's blackmail, we must individually speak up among friends and communities, and also let our lawmakers know what we think. It's time to raise some hell.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/mitch-mcconnell-2649519136/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/republican-party-funding/
it's time to defund the GOP, and there's precedent and strategy for the effort.
The need to cut the party's access to both private and government money is seen in the reaction by some extremist Republicans to news like a New York State lawmaker's proposal to make vaccination against COVID-19 mandatory. Predictably, the far right is freaking out. "Freedom!" they scream as they run around maskless, assaulting their fellow citizens with potentially virus-laden breath.
Large parts of the Republican base now join conspiracists in the misguided belief that vaccine manufacturers are participating in mind-control experiments and that public health measures like masks are "un-American," while we're being sickened and dying from the highest rates of COVID-19 infection and death in the developed world.
Republicans on the Supreme Court even say the founders of our republic and the framers of the Constitution would never go along with preventing churches and synagogues from holding superspreader events during a pandemic, but, like so many things GOP, it's a lie.
In 1798, President John Adams signed the first public health care legislation—it was to pay for medical care and hospitalization not just for the Navy but also for civilian sailors. And both he and President George Washington had participated in quarantine events during epidemics in the summers of 1793 and 1798, and both promoted inoculation against smallpox.
From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the nation's capital. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 recurred in 1798, that city's board of health, with no objections raised by President John Adams or any member of Congress, ordered a block-by-block evacuation of parts of Philadelphia.
Most signers of the Declaration and Constitution were still alive, and many were in Congress and on the Supreme Court. None opposed the lockdown. Churches not only couldn't meet; a few in the quarantine areas were closed down entirely for much of the year in America's capital city.
From their bans on teaching sex education and evolution in our schools, to denying climate change, to this latest campaign against public health, far-right Republicans' fight against science has damaged America's standing in the world and destroyed the lives of millions.
Thomas Paine, in his time, wrote about "The Age of Reason." Today we have "The Age of Intentional Republican Stupidity." And they don't just embrace it for themselves; they're hell-bent on imposing it on every American, from schoolchildren on up.
They have rigged elections by making it hard to vote, seditiously tried to overturn the 2020 election, promoted racial and religious bigotry and violence, destroyed our public school systems, gutted our unions, and rewritten our tax system to screw the middle class.
Since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have damaged America more in 40 years than our worst enemies could have dreamed of by other means.
These Republicans are not patriots; they're traitors to reason, science, education, human rights, democracy and now, unbelievably, public health. They're traitors to humanity itself.
The only way to deal with a death-dealing cult is to end it; thus, we must embark on a campaign to defund the Republican Party.
Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party, and actually pulled it off.
While the Republican Party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions. So Ronald Reagan, as part of his "Reagan Revolution," figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America's unions.
His first shot was to destroy PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union, and he did it in less than a week in August of 1981. He, along with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court, then embarked on a campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus gutting the Democratic Party's ability to win elections.
It worked, and by 1992, American union membership, and union's ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party turned to giant corporations and billionaires to win that election year.
Reagan's plan not only kneecapped the Democratic Party for the next 40 years but also changed the party at its core, turning it from President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society party into Bill Clinton's corporate-friendly Democratic Leadership Council/New Democrats, now in bed with big banks, insurance companies, etc.
Defunding the Republican Party may even force it to start focusing on the needs of regular people rather than just billionaires and corporations, which only adds to the urgency of the job. There are just a few steps through the process, which include:
End "Red State Welfare."
Kentucky gets $2.41 for every dollar they send to Washington, D.C. Most other red states are similarly "taker" states, so let's fight for a law limiting states to no more than, say, $1.50 for every buck they sent to D.C. in tax revenues. Call it welfare reform!
End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $700 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, and nearly $1 trillion a year we give to Big Pharma, as well as support for insurance companies (like subsidies for the "Medicare Advantage" scam) and "Big Ag."
End corporate monopolies. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses while rejuvenating local economies. From airlines to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working-class Americans and use some of that money to fund the GOP.
Bring back Eisenhower's 91 percent top tax rate, or at least something north of 50 percent. America's strongest economy was during the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, with a top tax rate of 91 percent to 74 percent. Progressive taxation on the super-wealthy was openly supported by Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford. With that tax revenue, we built highways, schools and hospitals, and put men on the moon, while the best way CEOs could avoid the tax was to use the money to pay their workers better wages. Reagan cut that top rate to less than 30 percent, and the billionaires it produced now pour money into the GOP to keep it that way.
Follow Europe's example and impose a wealth tax on great fortunes. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year—the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. Billionaires should pay a similar annual tax on their money bins.
End campaign contributions from corporations, end super PACs, and limit billionaires' ability to skew our politics with their money. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one.
These simple "Progressive Contract with America" steps, along with restoring the ability of American workers to unionize, will not only revive the Democratic Party, but also restore America to economic greatness and give us a far more honest political system.
Thom Hartmann is America's number one progressive talk-show host and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His online writings are compiled at HartmannReport.com. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
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yes, the election was rigged -- but by the Republicans
Thom Hartmann November 17, 2020
It turns out that Donald Trump was right: the election was rigged. He would know, of course, because he and Louis DeJoy were the ones who rigged it.
Historically, "conservative" (e.g. "white racist") efforts to rig the vote were almost entirely focused on preventing people of color from voting. For almost a century, this involved literacy tests, guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar, and other low-tech, blatant strategies.
In the 1960s, William Rehnquist and friends launched "Operation Eagle Eye" in the Southwest where they would send "poll watchers" to threaten and intimidate Native American, Hispanic and Black voters.
By the 1980s, Republicans had rolled out "caging," where they'd send a postcard to voters and if it wasn't returned they'd remove you from the voting rolls; the Democratic Party got a restraining order against caging that just expired a few years ago.
In 2000, George and Jeb Bush, the governors of Texas and Florida, used the Texas felon list to purge mostly Black and Hispanic people from the Florida voter rolls. Jeb knocked 90,000 African-Americans off the rolls, just in time to steal the 2000 election for George.
Kris Kobach turned this into a system, called Interstate Crosscheck, and took it nationwide over the last 15 years, comparing states' voting rolls in ways that would largely disenfranchise Asians, Blacks and Hispanics.
Finally, in 2020, Trump came up with a new scheme that benefited from the Covid virus, and the worse the virus got, the better his scheme worked.
Letting the pandemic run wild while telling his supporters they should only vote in person, Trump and DeJoy dismantled over 600 multimillion dollar high-speed mail sorting machines, hitting swing states the hardest, so mailed ballots would arrive too late to count.
Recent reporting suggests that if the courts had not intervened when and how they did, the mail would have been so slowed in several critical swing states that Trump would've been declared the winner. We were saved by a federal judge.
Now the scam Republicans are promoting is to challenge the signatures on the outside of mail-in ballots from big cities, and this has helped them throw out literally millions of ballots just this month.
Nobody is sure what the next conservative scheme will be to disqualify votes in American cities, but you can bet they're working on it. Which is why we need a law or Constitutional amendment that unambiguously asserts a "right to vote."
If Governor Brian Kemp wants to take away the home of a person who lives in Atlanta, he has to go to court and prove his case: our property rights are intact.
If Governor Ron DeSantis wants to take away a gun from a person who lives in Miami, he has to go to court and prove his case: the Supreme Court has recently affirmed Americans' right to own a gun.
But if any governor wants to take away your vote, they don't even have to tell you, they just kick you off the voting rolls, because right now voting is not a right in America, it's merely a privilege.
America needs to join the rest of the developed world and put the right of citizens to vote into law. Since everything from pandemic relief to education to foreign policy flows out of the democratic process, this must be Job One in the new Congress.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/bidens-presidency-could-be-the-last-gasp-of-democracy-says-hartmann-unless-democrats-dump-neoliberal-economics-thom-hartmann/
America is in limbo.
There is the good: Joe Biden is president-elect. He has defeated Donald Trump, winning the highest percentage of eligible voters since Richard Nixon in 1972. Biden also received the highest number of votes in American history — approximately 77 million. It is clear that the American people have given Biden a mandate to lead the country into a better future.
As expected, Donald Trump continues to claim, against all evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 election was "stolen" from him through "voter fraud" and is attempting to use the courts to overturn the election results. To this point these efforts have completely failed. Biden has announced a committee of esteemed experts who will lead the country's efforts to defeat the coronavirus pandemic. Pfizer recently announced that it has developed a vaccine against the coronavirus which should be ready for mass distribution in 2021. Despite all of Donald Trump and his movement's assaults on the country's democracy, social cohesion and even its future, there is a sense that President Biden could both return the country to "normalcy" and then make it better and stronger.
Then there is the bad. Donald Trump received approximately 72 million votes in the 2020 election, about 10 million more than he did in 2016. The ideology of Trumpism, built on white supremacy, nativism, collective narcissism, misogyny, greed, corruption, right-wing Christian extremism, anti-intellectualism, cruelty and other pathologies were enthusiastically endorsed, rather than rejected, by tens of millions of Americans.
Trump is also attempting an obvious slow-motion coup, in which he is purging senior national security officials who have shown themselves unwilling to do his bidding, for example, by turning the country's military against the American people. Trump's coup plot is part of a much bigger effort to delegitimize the very idea of democracy and free elections in America. Breaking from centuries of tradition in the United States, Trump has refused to concede defeat or assist in the lawful transfer of power to Biden. Trump's right-wing paramilitaries and other political thugs remain "standing by" to engage in acts of violence against his "enemies." Trump will not surrender his efforts to remain president for life. The coronavirus pandemic continues to spread uncontrollably. The country's economy is still in ruins.
Joe Biden is a much better human being than Donald Trump. That fact is indisputable. But just because Biden is a good person does not mean that he will have any advantage in successfully managing the deeply entrenched forces of social inequality, injustice, societal alienation and loneliness, plutocracy, gangster capitalism, white supremacy and pathocracy.
At the Nation, Tom Engelhardt describes the myriad challenges Biden will soon inherit:
Trumpism has split America in two in a way that hasn't been imaginable since the Civil War. The president and the Senate are likely to be in gridlock, the judicial system a partisan affair of the first order, the national security state a money-gobbling shadow empire, the citizenry armed to the teeth, racism rising, and life everywhere in an increasing state of chaos.
Welcome to the (Dis)United States. Donald Trump led the way and, whatever he does, I suspect that this, for at least the time being, is still in some sense his world, not Joe Biden's. He was the man and, like it or not, we were all his apprentices in a performance of destructive power of the first order that has yet to truly end.
How should the American people navigate such a state of personal and national limbo and the feelings and emotions which come from such a deep lack of certainty about the future of the country?
Thom Hartmann, a radio host, bestselling author, and leading progressive voice counsels that the American people — and liberals and progressives in particular — should be both optimistic and cautious about Joe Biden's presidency.
Hartmann's newest book is "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream." The Thom Hartmann Show can be heard from 12 to 3 p.m., Eastern time, via the nonprofit Pacifica Network and on commercial radio stations all across the United States.
In this conversation, Hartmann explains that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have the potential to enact a progressive policy agenda if they are sufficiently pressured and held accountable. Hartmann also explains that the Democratic Party has for too long run away from its winning message on the economy by embracing neoliberalism instead of the history and legacy of the New Deal and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Such bad habits still linger after Biden's victory over Trump, as even now some mainstream Democrats are complaining that the party has gone too far left, which is why it lost seats in the House and failed to win the Senate.
Hartmann also issues an ominous warning: Biden's presidency may be the last opportunity to save American democracy from the Republican Party and a global right-wing authoritarian movement.
You can also listen to my conversation with Thom Hartmann on my podcast "The Truth Report" or through the player embedded below.
Is this what victory feels like?
This is like a moment when the child in the story says, "But the emperor has no clothes!" We got rid of the emperor, but the empire is still here, in the form of the Republican Party and conservatives.
There is also a worldwide coalition of governments run by strongman leaders who do not like democracy and see it as a threat to their rule, wealth and power. That group will continue to do everything they can to destroy democracy.
Right now, their useful idiots are the Republican Party and particularly these Republican senators who are feeding the whole Trump narrative that "Our democratic institutions have been corrupted" and "You can't trust democratic institutions, you can't trust democracy." These are messages carefully calibrated to destroy our faith in democratic institutions. And yes, it is absolutely true that America is not so much a democracy any longer, we are an oligarchy.
Republican senators represent about 25 percent of the American people. The Electoral College is not reflective of America as a whole. The Supreme Court has handed over to billionaires and big corporations the keys to the kingdom, essentially. They can own and buy and sell politicians and they do so every day..
There is a struggle for democracy in this democratic republic. This is the last gasp of that struggle.
I keep trying to remind people that the 2020 election and Biden's victory was a battle and not a war. Declaring victory is premature. Do you think that the American people are going to stay engaged, or are they so exhausted that they have convinced themselves that they won and Trumpism is defeated?
I suspect that we are going to see the normal drop-off that one sees after a presidential election. The runoff in Georgia is probably going to be more like a midterm. That having been said, people want a return to normalcy, or at the very least not having to compulsively check their news sources five times a day to see what new, fresh hell Donald Trump just rolled out.
I think that all the elections going forward are going to be somewhat different than elections in the past few decades. Up until the 2020 election, the Republican Party had been successful, starting with the Reagan revolution, in arguing that they had new ideas. They knew what would work and what wouldn't work. They were good at governing. They were prepared to take leadership. The Republicans were going to campaign on their ideas. In this election, people figured out that the principal tool that the Republican Party uses to win elections is not ideas, it is voter suppression.
The spectacle of the 24/7 news media and the commentariat is always something to behold. They seemed to be shocked and dismayed at how much support for Donald Trump there is in America. They could not believe how close this election was. One would think that the mainstream news media and its commentators would understand the reality of the sheer amount of rage and white supremacy there is in the country.
I was expecting a tighter race than the polls were predicting, although I was expecting Biden to win. I think that a lot of us, particularly a lot of whites of goodwill, had completely misread the level of malevolence or toxicity of white racism in America. I was guessing that the really hardcore white racist vote in the United States was 10%, 15% or maybe 20%. I am now thinking it is more like 35% or 40%, which horrifies me. I do not know how else to explain this. I understand that Trump's populist economic message was very successful after 40 years of neoliberalism and shipping our jobs to China. The tragedy is that it is a process begun by Reagan and Bush.
Democrats never talk about that because Clinton continued it and nobody wants to trash Bill Clinton. But I believe that it is really time that we trash Bill Clinton and reject the neoliberalism that he introduced into our party. The other issue that must be confronted is how extraordinarily toxic Facebook is. Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues have used algorithms in a way that has really amplified the hard-right echo chamber and hate message.
Instead of becoming more progressive and forward-thinking, the Democrats over the last few decades have too often retreated from those ideas. I worry that will be the lesson of the 2020 election.
They have to recognize the economic component. And that is the problem: the Democrats have the winning economic message. Consider those places around the country where a $15 minimum wage was on the ballot — it typically won. Economic messages are great for Democrats, but the Democratic Party does not want to run on them because there is this internal debate between the corporate Democrats who want to protect the oil industry and the banking industry and the insurance industry, and the people-funded Democrats, the progressive Democrats, who are perfectly willing to take those industries on because the latter are basically parasites. = EXTRACTION
We pay twice as much for health care as any other country in the world. That is a $3,000 to $5,000 a year tax on the average American family. We pay more than twice as much than any other country in the developed world for internet, for telephone service, for cable TV, for health insurance, and for airfare.
The average family in America pays $5,000 a year more than in other developed countries just because our business systems have become so monopolized. We are in the grip of this neoliberal corporate monster that has just been draining the wealth out of the middle class, out of working-class people's pockets, and putting it into the top 1%. And Democrats are perfectly positioned to talk about that.
But oddly, Donald Trump has been the one for the last five years talking about that issue. The Democratic Party is leaving so many voters behind by not taking on these economic issues.
I want Joe Biden to succeed and be a great president. How do we hold Joe Biden accountable, given his track record as a corporate Democrat?
The fact that Kamala Harris is his running mate, and that Karine Jean-Pierre is her chief of staff -- she is one of the best progressives out there, and also one of the most well-informed progressives I've ever seen in the media. That gives me a lot of hope.
But Biden did run on a far more progressive platform than Obama or Clinton. We really need to get back to the values of the Great Society and the New Deal. I am not expecting any big initiatives to come until after the inauguration and possibly until after the election in Georgia.
Biden has been openly reaching out to Trumpists and other Republicans with his language about "healing" and saying we are not "enemies" of one another here in America. There are also the persistent discussions of Biden perhaps even including Republicans in his new administration. What about accountability? I am deeply concerned about Biden's temperament and willingness to compromise with Republicans and in doing so betraying the American people and the mandate they have given him.
I suspect that if Joe Biden reaches out to Republicans, he is going to get his hand slapped. And once again, much is going to depend on the election in Georgia. We just have to keep the pressure on him. I am not willing to prejudge Biden on how he is going to govern. I am willing to give it a couple of months and then let us see what happens. We can't just go to sleep. We can't just go on vacation. This is the immediate, small but noisy cancer that may have been excised from our republic or will be hopefully by Jan. 20.
But the metastasis of it, all the thousands of cancer cells throughout the body, they're still there. And we really need the chemotherapy of an aggressive progressive agenda, the Green New Deal, eliminating student debt and Medicare for All, as a starting point.
Will the corporatists and plutocrats and other members of the financial elite have more or less power after Trump?
They are to a certain extent above it all. They are going to continue making their money no matter. The system has been so rigged to the advantage of very wealthy people since the 1980s. They have not seen any real serious challenges to their power.
For example, with Medicare for All, the only rich people who are going to be hurt are the multi-millionaires in the insurance industry. Good riddance. It's a relatively small number of people.
The Green New Deal is actually going to be a money-making opportunity for people in business.
Eliminating student debt can be done by using government funds. If we can hand a trillion and a half dollars to the top 15% of Americans in a Trump tax cut and the republic survives, there is only a trillion and a half dollars worth of student debt and we could just literally pay it all off and say, "That's it, no more, nor in the future."
And nobody would be hurt. The main battle in that regard is going to be against the libertarian billionaires, the Charles Kochs of the world who are funding all these groups, the state policy groups, ALEC, FreedomWorks and the like in what is an ideological battle between libertarians and people who believe in democracy.
There will be opposition. There will be people screaming, "Socialism!" — but they were screaming "Socialism!" around Medicare. They screamed "Socialism!" around Medicaid. They screamed "Socialism!" around Social Security. I think we can get past that.
What does accountability and reckoning look like for the Trump regime?
I want prosecutions. Kellyanne Conway should be facing jail for breaking the Hatch Act. Ivanka Trump should be facing jail. They knew that what they were doing was illegal. They flaunted it intentionally. The campaign finance violations. I also believe that we really need to be looking into Wilbur Ross playing the stock market with inside information. It is time that the rule of law has to apply to rich white people.
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an 920
only winner of last night's 'debate' was dictatorship and oligarchy
Thom Hartmann Common Dreams September 30, 2020
What we saw last night was the dictator's playbook.
Tell violent white supremacist racists to "stand by" and encourage them to s...
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-gop-reshaped-american-democracy-to-hold-onto-power-can-the-democrats-do-the-same-thing-to-save-it/
In the power grab to fill the Supreme Court seat announced the same evening as the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mitch McConnell didn’t do anything new. The GOP has a long history of playing hardball power politics.
In the late 19th century, Republicans added four states (Nevada, Colorado, North Dakota, and South Dakota) purely to gain eight new Republican senators, a trick Democrats could duplicate today by bringing statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico (and maybe even Guam).
And in 1877, Republicans installed their presidential candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, into the White House after he had lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote to Democrat Samuel Tilden, a case Trump may have been referring to in a press conference on September 16, saying, “at a certain point, it goes to Congress.” (This is the 12th Amendment nightmare I wrote about in March and Greg Palast has recently pursued.)
Republicans have also reduced the size of the Supreme Court specifically to deny a Democratic president a nominee before. (And, of course, there’s the sordid tale of what they did to Merrick Garland.) Democrats can easily change the composition of the court with a simple majority if they control the House and Senate after the election and choose to end the slavery-era filibuster rule. The closest any Democrat has ever come to this sort of thing was in 1937 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened to “pack” the court as Republicans had done 71 years earlier. (The threat and widespread public opinion in its favor worked, forcing the court to change its position on the New Deal, so the issue never came to a vote in Congress.)
Pushing the boundaries even further, over the course of now-Chief Justice John Roberts’ career working for President Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, he proposed a nuclear option that Republican lawmakers could use to legislatively overturn Brown v. Board and Roe v. Wade whether the Supreme Court liked it or not. Roberts’ plan was never implemented, but it’s still a long-shot option.
McConnell knows the first lesson of power politics: when representing only a minority, you must ruthlessly grab every bit of power you can, every time you can.
Republicans in the U.S. Senate represent about 15 million fewer Americans than do Democrats. The last Republican president initially elected with a majority vote from the American people was George H.W. Bush, 32 years ago in 1988; George W. Bush lost by about a half-million votes, and Trump lost by almost 3 million. In the U.S. House in 2018, 9 million more Americans voted for a Democrat than a Republican, a margin (8.6 percent) far larger than their actual governing majority.
Nonetheless, Republicans tenaciously hang onto power and do whatever it takes to both hold and increase that power at every opportunity.
Democrats must learn from this history and consider all of these options if they win the White House and the Senate, and hold the House this November. Being elected with solid majorities will enhance their credibility when they seize and wield that power, so it’s doubly important now to strike when the opportunity arises.
Here’s a deeper dive into the background, largely drawn from my books The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and The Hidden History of the War on Voting.
Packing the Court in 1801
Thomas Jefferson beat John Adams in the election of 1800, and so, during the lame-duck session of 1801, Adams’ Federalists (the conservative party at that time) passed the Judiciary Act of 1801 to cut the size of the Supreme Court from six members to five, purely to deny Jefferson an opportunity to make an appointment. (Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans—today’s Democratic Party—increased the number of members of the court to seven in 1802.)
The law also created 16 new federal judgeships, which Adams sought to quickly fill before Jefferson took office in March; that created a mess that led to the Marbury v. Madison decision, which authorized the court to strike down laws passed by Congress.
Packing the Court in 1866/1869
In 1866, Republicans in the House and Senate passed a law to reduce the number of justices on the Supreme Court from 10 to 7 to deny Democratic President Andrew Johnson an opportunity to fill a seat opened up with the 1865 death of Associate Justice John Catron. Johnson was furious, but there was nothing he could do.
Three years later, with Johnson out of the White House and Republican President Ulysses Grant safely in charge, they passed the Judiciary Act of 1869 that raised the number of justices up to nine, where it has stood till today.
Packing the Court in 1937
During FDR’s presidency, four of the Supreme Court’s justices, Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland, and Willis Van Devanter, were collectively known as the Four Horsemen. They were invariably joined by one of the other justices, particularly Justice Owen Roberts, to strike down New Deal legislation that attempted to address unemployment and poverty, no matter how popular it was.
For the preceding decades during the Lochner era, the court had struck down dozens of state laws protecting workers, including women and children.
In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled that both the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act were unconstitutional, gutting Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act had passed in 1933 with 76 percent of the House of Representatives voting for it. The bill passed the Senate, also with 76 percent of the Senate voting for it.
Historian William Leuchtenburg wrote for Smithsonian magazine that after the Agricultural Adjustment Act was struck down, “Many farmers were incensed. On the night following [Justice Owen] Roberts’ opinion, a passerby in Ames, Iowa, discovered life-size effigies of the six majority opinion justices hanged by the side of a road.”
The National Industrial Recovery Act had likewise passed with 71 percent of the House voting for it and 81 percent of senators voting for it.
When the Supreme Court used its power of judicial review to overturn these laws, it wasn’t viewed just as an assault on FDR’s New Deal. It was, in the opinion of many Americans (and FDR himself), an assault on the very basis of our democratic republic.
Then, shortly before Roosevelt was reelected in 1936, the court struck down a New York state law that established a minimum wage for women and children in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo.
The pendulum of popular opinion swung hard against the court almost overnight. One Republican newspaper in New York declared its opposition to the ruling: “The law that would jail any laundryman for having an underfed horse should jail him for having an underfed girl employee.”
And as historian David B. Woolner, author of The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace, noted, “Over… 13 months, the court struck down more pieces of legislation than at any other time in U.S. history.”
In 1937, the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act (both passed in 1935) were on their way to the court. Considering how the Four Horsemen had ruled during FDR’s first term, Roosevelt knew that he needed to do something or risk losing both pieces of legislation.
With the New Deal on the line, Roosevelt went on the attack. On February 5, 1937, just months after his landslide reelection, he announced his plan. He asked Congress for the authority to appoint one justice for each justice over 70 who would not retire.
In 1937, the average life expectancy for men in the United States was only 58 years old. The average age of the Supreme Court justices at the time was 71 years old, and six of the justices were age 70 or older. A book mocking the court, called The Nine Old Men, “was rapidly moving up the bestseller lists,” as Leuchtenburg wrote.
FDR directly called into question the “capacity of the judges themselves” to dispose of the growing number of cases facing federal courts. The United States’ population had increased nearly 70 percent between 1900 and 1936, and the number of cases facing federal court dockets had exploded. Citizens were waiting longer and longer to go in front of older and older judges.
Roosevelt’s plan would have immediately given him six appointments to the Supreme Court and up to 44 appointments for federal lower courts. Roosevelt argued that “[a] constant and systematic addition of younger blood will vitalize the courts.”
On March 9, 1937, Roosevelt told the nation that the court was ruling not just against himself and Congress, but against the will of the American people.
“The Courts,” Roosevelt told the nation, “have cast doubts on the ability of the elected Congress to protect us against catastrophe by meeting squarely our modern social and economic conditions.”
Roosevelt’s critics were aghast at his plans. They claimed he was trying the “pack the court” with justices who would simply be his yes men.
Reacting to his critics, Roosevelt cut to the heart of the matter:
“[I]f by that phrase the charge is made… that I will appoint Justices who will not undertake to override the judgment of the Congress on legislative policy, that I will appoint Justices who will act as Justices and not as legislators—if the appointment of such Justices can be called ‘packing the Courts,’ then I say that I and with me the vast majority of the American people favor doing just that thing—now.”
Congress never voted on the plan. It’s unclear whether it would have succeeded, or if a more moderate plan that would have given him only two or three justices might have passed more easily.
Instead, on March 29, 1937, a Washington state minimum wage law came before the Supreme Court in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. The law in question was nearly identical to the New York state law that had come before the court a year earlier when it had outlawed minimum wage laws as being unconstitutional.
But this time, Justice Owen Roberts abandoned the Four Horsemen to uphold Washington’s minimum wage in a 5-4 decision. In a further series of 5-4 decisions two weeks later, the court upheld the National Labor Relations Act as constitutional. The nation was astonished.
Labor Secretary Frances Perkins was close friends with Justice Roberts’ wife, Elizabeth. When the decisions came down, according to Kirstin Downey’s biography of Perkins, “she rushed that afternoon to Roberts’ home” and “threw her arms around the man and hugged him.”
“Owen, I am so proud of you,” Perkins told the Supreme Court justice. “A man of your standing and intelligence who is not afraid to change his mind!”
Downey wrote of how Roberts was embarrassed by the affection but also very pleased. “Really, do you think so?” he replied to Perkins.
Less than two months later, the court declared that Social Security was constitutional.
The New Deal had been saved from execution on the Supreme Court’s bench. Social Security had been salvaged, and the National Labor Relations Act gave labor and unions a lifeline after generations of fighting to stay afloat.
Roberts’ about-face in West Coast Hotel case was referred to at the time as “the switch in time that saved nine,” rendering FDR’s proposal unnecessary.
Packing the Senate
In 1864, Abraham Lincoln was looking at the potential future composition of the U.S. Supreme Court after the war, concerned that Democrats might end up controlling the judicial body.
Back then, it took roughly 125,000 citizens in a territory to qualify it for statehood, and the Nevada Territory only had 40,000 residents, but almost all were GOP-aligned. So, ignoring the 125,000-person requirement (it was more a matter of policy than law), Lincoln proposed statehood for Nevada and Congress approved it, adding two new GOP senators.
After the Civil War, as Southern (and Democratic-controlled) states were reintegrating into the Union, Republican President Ulysses Grant was worried that Democrats might end up controlling the Senate, and so in 1876 Grant and Republicans in Congress added Colorado—with fewer than 40,000 residents—as a new state, gaining two more GOP senators.
Democrats were rising in power again when Democrat Grover Cleveland won the White House in 1884 and won the popular vote (but lost the Electoral College) in 1888. Popular-vote loser Republican President Benjamin Harrison, in 1889, successfully proposed the Dakota Territory—which then had 134,000 residents—be split into two territories, North Dakota (pop. 36,000) and South Dakota (pop. 98,000), and each of them become states with two senators each.
Thus, in 25 years, the GOP added eight senators, largely cementing their control of the Senate until the Great Depression; from Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861 until FDR’s inauguration in 1933, Democrats controlled the Senate for only 10 years.
Roberts’ Nuclear Option to Get Around the Supreme Court
The year 1981 was a big one for court-stripping—or, as it’s sometimes called, jurisdiction-stripping. No fewer than 30 pieces of legislation were introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives by Republican congressmen that included court-stripping provisions. It was a huge topic of discussion and legal activity among Republicans.
And a young lawyer working in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, an up-and-comer named John Roberts, was hot on the trail.
Court-stripping is based on the idea that Congress has the power, under the Constitution, to pass laws that include provisions that specifically prevent (or strip the jurisdiction of) the Supreme Court (or any other federal court, if stipulated) from ruling on that particular law or issue’s constitutionality.
It’s based on Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution, which says, “[T]he [S]upreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled, in Brown v. Board, that states had to racially integrate their schools. Southern states promised “massive resistance” in defiance, and entire school districts were shut down; many Southern states opened private all-white “segregation academies” such as the one Mississippi Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith famously went to and sent her daughter to.
Brown provoked a mini-industry among right-wing white racists: Fred Koch’s beloved John Birch Society was putting up “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards across the nation and publishing articles and pamphlets tying civil rights activists to communism; hundreds of all-white private schools opened; and conservative scholars of the Supreme Court and the Constitution searched through old books and debates from the founding era to that day looking for rationales to overturn the decision.
Other than years of disruption to public education and a redoubled effort by conservatives to keep public schools funded with local property taxes (so that poor and/or Black schools would continue to turn out poorly educated students), not a great deal came of the opposition to Brown v. Board.
But defying the Court became a much bigger business in 1973, when the court in Roe v. Wade ruled that women have the right, at least in the first trimester of a pregnancy, to choose to have an abortion pretty much anywhere in the country, for any reason.
Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a speech about education and states’ rights to a predominantly white crowd near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964. Willing to say and do whatever it took to take the White House, Reagan was the perfect vessel for a white supremacy message opposing forced integration, welfare for Black people, and abortion for white women.
Reagan’s administration brought together a constellation of conservative white men to change the face of America. Ted Olson, who later argued Bush v. Gore before the U.S. Supreme Court, led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. As an assistant attorney general, Olson worked with counselor to the attorney general Ken Starr (appointed to that job in 1981), who was later (1989-1993) George H.W. Bush’s solicitor general. Other new faces Reagan hired included Samuel Alito and John Roberts.
Starr tasked Roberts, a staunchly antiabortion Catholic, with reviewing the entire history of the U.S. Supreme Court for cases that suggested a legislative or administrative way to overturn Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board.
Roberts wrote an extraordinary 27-page document that’s largely unknown, in the form of a memo on the letterhead of the Office of the Attorney General, to Ken Starr, signed by Roberts as special assistant to the attorney general. It is titled, “Proposals to Divest the Supreme Court of Appellate Jurisdiction: An Analysis in Light of Recent Developments.”
Roberts wrote that he had found “over twenty bills [pending in Congress] which would divest the Supreme Court (and, in most instances, lower federal courts as well) of jurisdiction to hear certain types of controversies, ranging from school prayer and desegregation cases to abortion cases.”
What Roberts and his researchers had discovered was substantial.
Court-stripping is based on the exceptions clause of Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution, which stipulates that the courts exist “with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
Roberts noted in his memo that “[t]he exceptions clause by its terms contains no limit… This clear and unequivocal language is the strongest argument in favor of congressional power and the inevitable stumbling block for those would read the clause in a more restricted fashion.”
Roberts was looking at the nuclear option. If he could build a strong case for Congress passing a law against abortion or desegregation, and persuade Congress to use the exceptions clause to render the courts moot, then this could be the magic bullet to restore segregation and recriminalize abortion.
Roberts concluded with a 1968 comment from Sam Ervin of North Carolina, one of the Senate’s most outspoken opponents of racial integration and abortion.
He wrote, “As Senator Ervin noted during hearings on the exceptions clause, ‘I don’t believe that the Founding Fathers could have found any simpler words or plainer words in the English language to say what they said, which was that the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is dependent entirely upon the will of Congress.’”
Roberts agreed: “[W]e are not considering a constitutional clause that is by its nature indeterminate and incapable of precise or fixed meaning, such as the due process clause or the prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.”
This was clearly the original intent, Roberts argued, because “the exceptions clause ‘was not debated’ by the Committee of Detail which drafted it or the whole Convention.”
Citing Federalist, no. 81, Roberts wrote, “Hamilton noted that the clause would enable ‘the government to modify [appellate jurisdiction] in such a manner as will best answer the ends of public justice and security,’ and that appellate jurisdiction was ‘subject to any exceptions and regulations which may be thought advisable.’”
Section III of Roberts’ screed on court-stripping dives deep into Supreme Court decisions to find rulings explicitly saying that Congress can regulate the Supreme Court and block the court from ruling on particular issues.
Beginning with the 1869 decision Ex parte McCardle, Roberts wrote, “A unanimous Court upheld the power of Congress to divest the Supreme Court of jurisdiction. The Court clearly based its decision on Congress’ power under the exceptions clause. Chief Justice Chase began the opinion by recognizing that the appellate jurisdiction of the Court ‘is conferred “with such exceptions and under such regulations as Congress shall make.”’”
Quoting Chase again, Roberts added his own emphasis: “We are not at liberty to inquire into the motives of the legislature. We can only examine into its power under the Constitution; and the power to make exceptions to the appellate jurisdiction of this Court is given by express words [underline Roberts’].”
He continued his historical exposé of court-stripping with another 1869 decision, Ex parte Yerger, and then United States v. Klein (1872), Wiscart v. Dauchy (1796), Durousseau v. United States (1810), Daniels v. Railroad (1865), and The Francis Wright (1881).
In The Francis Wright, Roberts found that Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite (whose court oversaw the infamous 1886 “corporate personhood” Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case) wrote for a unanimous court, quoting him as follows: “Not only may whole classes of cases be kept out of the jurisdiction altogether, but particular classes of questions may be subjected to re-examination and review, while others are not.”
Each case strengthened the idea that Congress could simply pass a law, without even needing a supermajority, that barred the Supreme Court from ruling on a set of issues—like Reagan’s hot-button issues of school desegregation and abortion.
Moving toward late-19th-century decisions, Roberts quoted the court in Colorado Central Consolidated Mining Co. v. Turck (1893): “[I]t has been held in an uninterrupted series of decisions that this Court exercises appellate jurisdiction only in accordance with the acts of Congress upon the subject.”
Roberts, in his own voice, added, “Again, it bears emphasis that the basis for this theory is the implicit exercise by Congress of its exceptions power when it makes a limited grant of jurisdiction.”
Still building his case, Roberts jumped into 20th-century rulings, starting with National Mutual Insurance Co. v. Tidewater Transfer Co. (1948). Writing for the majority, Justice Felix Frankfurter noted in the decision, “Congress need not give this Court any appellate power; it may withdraw appellate jurisdiction once conferred and it may do so even while a case is sub judice.”
About the 1944 Yakus v. United States case, Roberts wrote, “Justice Rutledge noted… that ‘Congress has plenary power to confer or withhold appellate jurisdiction.’”
Regarding Flast v. Cohen (1968), Roberts quoted from Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote, “[A]s respects our appellate jurisdiction, Congress may largely fashion it as Congress desires by reason of the express provisions of Section 2, Article III. See Ex parte McCardle.”
In Section IV of his memo, Roberts again covered the span from the framing of the Constitution to the time of his writing the memo, quoting another dozen or so cases that referenced, less directly, the power of Congress to exempt the Court from certain issues or decisions.
Roberts also noted that the original Judiciary Act of 1789 (which created the federal court system) also refers to Congress’ power of exception.
Time to Play Hardball
Both demographics and popular political opinion are moving against the Republican Party, and Republican politicians know it. Democrats should use this moment—if we can succeed in fighting back the GOP fascist tide—to use historical precedent to reconfigure our government so it represents the will of a majority of Americans.
No more Mx. Nice Guy.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
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https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/177002
...It also meant that workers were often stripped of appropriate compensation for their work. “You take the new lumber companies that want to start on this wonderful process of making print paper out of yellow pine,” FDR continued. “One reason for the low wages of the workers in the pulp mills of Mississippi, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina is that practically all profits go north; they do not stay south. If the profits stayed south, the whole scale of living would go up.”
And then he brought it all back to the word fascism, which the dictionaries of the day defined as the merger of state and corporate power, a process that was well underway in Italy— where Mussolini had dissolved the elected parliament and replaced it with the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations, where the Italian equivalent of each congressional district was represented by its largest industry instead of an elected member—and Hitler and Tojo had both moved to bring powerful business leaders and industrial tycoons into government.
“I am greatly in favor of decentralization,” FDR wrapped up his answer to that question, “and yet the tendency is, every time we have trouble in private industry, to concentrate it all the more in New York. Now that is, ultimately, fascism.”
Nine days later, President Roosevelt brought up the issue again in his April 29, 1938, “Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power.”
Unhappy events abroad have re-taught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.
Speaking of the captains of industry who, in the election two years earlier he had said, “hate me, and I welcome their hatred,” FDR laid out the state of things that three previous Republican administrations (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) and their deregulatory fervor had brought about:
Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.
This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole.
Shifting from the rhetorical to the concrete, he gave a few startling examples:
Statistics of the Bureau of Internal Revenue reveal the following amazing figures for 1935:
Ownership of corporate assets: Of all corporations reporting from every part of the nation, one-tenth of 1 percent of them owned 52 percent of the assets of all of them.
And to clinch the point: Of all corporations reporting, less than 5 percent of them owned 87 percent of all assets of all of them.
Income and profits of corporations: Of all the corporations reporting from every part of the country, one-tenth of 1 percent of them earned 50 percent of the net income of all of them.
And to clinch the point: Of all the manufacturing corporations reporting, less than 4 percent of them earned 84 percent of all the net profits of all of them.
FDR pointed out that the Republican Great Depression (what it was called until the early 1950s) had played a role in this process by weakening small businesses and often forcing them to sell out to larger interests or to mortgage themselves to big players, generally in distant cities.
The Republican policies he was noting produced vast wealth for a small number of monopolists and stripped workers of their wages and security. And the monopolists were, throughout the Roaring Twenties, using the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover deregulation of the marketplace to concentrate ownership of America’s productive enterprises in their own tiny hands. The peak of the trend had been in the summer of 1929, when the market was at its top. ...
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/not-shocking-gops-covid-19-plan-puts-corporate-greed-before-human-need/
Not shocking: GOP’s COVID-19 plan puts corporate greed before human need
Written by Thom Hartmann / Common Dreams July 29, 2020
It should be called the HEELS Act, not the HEALS Act.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/we-have-now-reached-peak-libertarianism-and-it-is-literally-killing-us/
We have now reached peak Libertarianism, and this bizarre experiment that has been promoted by the billionaire class for over 40 years is literally killing us.
Back in the years before Reagan, a real estate lobbying group called the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) came up with the idea of creating a political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money. The party would give them ideological and political cover, and they developed an elaborate theology around it.
It was called the Libertarian Party, and their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, that that would benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army and a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners.
In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform was to privatize the Post Office, shut down all public schools, privatize Medicare and Medicaid, end food stamps and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight, and sell off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.
Since then, Libertarian billionaires and right-wing media have been working hard to get Americans to agree with Ronald Reagan’s statement from his first inaugural address that, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
And Trump is getting us there now.
Every federal agency of any consequence is now run by a lobbyist or former industry insider.
The Labor Department is trying to destroy organized labor; the Interior Department is selling off our public lands; the EPA is promoting deadly pesticides and allowing more and more pollution; the FCC is dancing to the tune of giant telecom companies; the Education Department is actively working to shut down and privatize our public school systems; the USDA is shutting down food inspections; the Defense Department is run by a former weapons lobbyist; even the IRS and Social Security agencies have been gutted, with tens of thousands of their employees offered early retirement or laid off so that very, very wealthy people are no longer being audited and the wait time for a Social Security disability claim is now over two years.
The guy Trump put in charge of the Post Office is actively destroying the Post Office, and the bonus for Trump might be that this will throw a huge monkey wrench in any effort to vote by mail in November.
Trump has removed the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, and fossil fuel lobbyists now control America’s response to global warming.
Our nation’s response to the coronavirus has been turned over to private testing and drug companies, and the Trump administration refuses to implement any official government policy, with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar saying that it’s all up to “individual responsibility.”
The result is more than 140,000 dead Americans and 3 million infected, with many fearing for their lives.
While the Libertarian ideas and policies promoted by that real estate lobbying group that invented the Libertarian Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich, it’s killing the rest of us.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt put America back together after the Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.
Now, 40 years of libertarian Reaganomics have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than anybody in the history of the world, and brought an entire generation of hustlers and grifters into public office via the GOP.
When America was still coasting on FDR’s success in rebuilding our government and institutions, nobody took very seriously the crackpot efforts to tear it all down.
Now that they’ve had 40 years to make their project work, we’re hitting peak Libertarianism and it’s tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing hundreds of people every day.
If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, and rebuild our civil institutions.
That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 40 years of libertarian Reaganism has done to this country.
Pass it on.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
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next death wave from COVID-19 will be the poor, rural and white
Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute
What do you call a crisis that kills a hundred thousand Americans? It all depends on who does the dying. At first, it seemed like it was mostly white people…
Trump’s official national emergency declaration came on March 11, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome. The economy crashed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.
Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.
And then came April 7, 2020.
I remember that week vividly; it was as if a light switch had been flipped, and I commented on it on the air at the time (and many times since).
April 7 was the day that America learned that the majority of the people who were dying from COVID-19 were either elderly, black or Hispanic. Not so many white guys, after all.
Exactly one month earlier, on March 7, Trump had played golf at his club in West Palm Beach, met with Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro at Mar-a-Lago, and visited the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. Over the previous week, U.S. deaths had risen from single digits to more than 20.
During the following month, all hell broke loose in the United States and around the world. Italy and Spain were melting down, as was the U.S. economy; cases were exploding in New York. The nation was united in the hope that the disease could be stopped dead in its tracks.
Then came April 7, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: “Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.” Across the American media landscape, similar headlines appeared at other outlets, and the story was heavily reported on cable news and the network news that night.
American conservatives responded with a collective, “What the hell?!?”
Rush Limbaugh declared soon after that “with the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component.” And here it was. “The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder—harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody, disproportionate representation.”
Claiming that he knew this was coming as if he were some sort of a medical savant, Limbaugh said, “But now these—here’s Fauxcahontas, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris demanding the federal government release daily race and ethnicity data on coronavirus testing, patients, and their health outcomes. So they want a database to prove we are not caring enough about African Americans…”
It didn’t take a medical savant, of course. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth. It’s a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a health care system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for more than 400 years. Of course they’re going to die more frequently from coronavirus.
But the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously publishing front-page articles about that disparity with regard to COVID-19, both on April 7, echoed across the right-wing media landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display.
Tucker Carlson, the only primetime Fox News host who’d previously expressed serious concerns about the death toll, changed his tune the same day, as documented by Media Matters for America.
Now, he said, “we can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That’s our task.”
White people were out of work, and black people were most of the casualties, outside of the extremely elderly. And those white people need their jobs back!
Brit Hume joined Carlson’s show and, using his gravitas as a “real news guy,” intoned, “The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.”
Left unsaid was the issue of whom it was not “quite as dangerous” to, but Limbaugh listeners and Fox viewers are anything but unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white supremacy.
More than 12,000 Americans had died from coronavirus by April 7, but once we knew that most of the non-elderly victims were black, things were suddenly very, very different. Now it was time to quit talking about people dying and start talking about white people getting back to work!
It took less than a week for Trump to get the memo, presumably through Fox and Stephen Miller. On April 12, he retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the United States back up, and that he’d be announcing a specific plan to do just that “shortly.”
On April 13, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published a policy paper titled “Implementing a National Return to Work Plan.”
Unspoken but big on the agenda of corporate America was the desire to get the states to rescind their stay-home-from-work orders so that companies could cut their unemployment tax losses.
When people file unemployment claims, those claims are ultimately paid for by the companies themselves, and with a high number of claims, a company will see a substantial future increase in their unemployment insurance premiums/taxes. If the “stay home” orders were repealed, workers could no longer, in most states, file for or keep receiving unemployment compensation.
On April 14, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and -funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an “economic recovery” program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to “shield” businesses from lawsuits.
Three days after that, Freedomworks and the House Freedom Caucus issued a joint statement declaring that “it’s time to re-open the economy.”
Freedomworks published their “#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide” encouraging conservatives to show up “[i]n-person” at their state capitols and governors’ mansions, and, for signage, to “Keep it short: ‘I’m essential,’ ‘Let me work,’ ‘Let Me Feed My Family’” and to “Keep them homemade.”
One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 18 in New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere.
One that drew particularly high levels of media attention, complete with swastikas, Confederate flags and assault rifles, was directed against the governor of Michigan, rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer.
When Rachel Maddow began reporting on meatpacking plants that had become epicenters of mass infection, the conservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out that the virus flare wasn’t coming from the “regular folks” of the surrounding community. Although the majority of the meat plant workers were Hispanic and the majority of the surrounding communities were white, her defenders suggested it was just a slip of the tongue.
Nonetheless, the conservative meme was now well established.
About a third of the people the virus killed were old folks in nursing homes. Which, right-wing commentators said, could be a good thing for the economy because they’re just “useless eaters” who are spending our Medicaid and Social Security money and are on death’s door anyway.
For example, Texas’s Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick told Fox News, “Let’s get back to living… And those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves.”
A conservative town commissioner in Antioch, California, noted that losing “many elderly [people]… would reduce burdens in our defunct Social Security System” and “free up housing.” He added, “We would lose a large portion of the people with immune and other health complications. I know it would be loved ones as well. But that would once again reduce our impact on medical, jobs, and housing.”
It came to Trump’s attention that the biggest outbreaks were happening in prisons and meatpacking plants, places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus seen as disposable). Trump’s response to this was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had hesitated to use to order the production of testing or PPE equipment) on April 28 to order the largely Hispanic and black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.
African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were dying in meatpacking plants, the elderly were dying in nursing homes.
But the death toll among white people, particularly affluent white people who were less likely to be obese, have hypertension or struggle with diabetes, was relatively low. And those who came through the infection were presumed to be immune to subsequent bouts, so we could issue them “COVID Passports” and give them hiring priority.
The only thing Republicans had overlooked in their master plan to help out the master race was the very real consequence of Reaganomics across the states of the former Confederacy.
Southern states had fought against any sort of state- or federally-funded health care plans since Reconstruction, claiming libertarian ideology while, in fact, their animus was directed at people of color.
Caught in those crosshairs, however, just as had been the case prior to the Civil War, were poor whites.
Many of the same political and economic factors that put African Americans at risk for the past two centuries were also used against poor whites.
In the 1930s when Huey Long was Louisiana’s senator and governor, he explicitly reached out to impoverished white people.
As the Encyclopedia Britannica notes, “Always the champion of poor whites, he effected a free-textbook law, launched a massive and very useful program of road and bridge building, expanded state university facilities, and erected a state hospital where free treatment for all was intended. He was opposed to excessive privileges for the rich, and he financed his improvements with increased inheritance and income taxes as well as a severance tax on oil…”
Long’s “every man a king” stump speech was particularly intolerable to Louisiana’s wealthy oligarchs, opening as it did with the line, “Is that a right of life, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120 million people?”
In 1935 Long was assassinated, and it wasn’t until 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson would try to get any aid to poor Southern whites with Medicaid and food stamps; that, too, was offensive to the conservative white political structure in the South.
As a result, poor whites in the South are likely to suffer from the diseases and lack of access to health care that make African Americans throughout the country so vulnerable to COVID-19.
And, over the past 40 years, Reaganism has encouraged the spread of deep white poverty from red state to red state. White obesity, diabetes and hypertension are, therefore, overrepresented in poor rural areas as far away as Nebraska and Mississippi.
In fact, the Brookings Institution just reported that of the counties where the virus has most recently exploded, 151 of them went for Trump in 2016 (by an average of 12 percent) and only 25 backed Clinton.
Today, Trump, Fox and his followers think COVID-19 just kills the elderly, blacks and Hispanics—and they seem comfortable with the needless deaths of people they think are different from themselves.
As it spreads into rural white America, however, they’re about to learn otherwise.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
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we need to plan now in case Trump loses in November — but refuses to leave the White House
Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute
The Constitution provides a couple of mechanisms for Trump to lose the 2020 election—both the popular vote and the Electoral College—and still hold the office of president for a second term. It’s…
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How Big Pharma twists the law to its will and leaves Americans worse off
Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute January 10, 2020
Big Pharma spends a small fortune every year buying politicians to make sure we can’t import prescription drugs from Canada, but they’re more than happy to sell us contaminated medications from countries with weak manufacturing controls and exploitable labor that ensure high-profit margins....
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-america-broke-up-with-the-democratic-party/
no lnx
How America broke up with the Democratic Party
Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute December 17, 2019
Many grassroots Democrats separated from their party in the 1990s, and the 2020 election may be the last chance to save the marriage.
While the GOP has been trying to establish a semi-permanent ruling majority through bigotry, gerrymandering and voter suppression, Democrats had long-term majority control of American politics pretty much continuously for more than a half-century.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected four times to the presidency and brought with him a Democratic Party sweep so complete that, with the exception of two brief two-year periods, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives from 1931 to 1995. FDR built the modern-day Democratic Party and launched it toward the 21st century.
Working-class Americans had fallen in love with Roosevelt and Democratic Party policies in the 1930s, and that love affair persisted across the better part of three generations. In the past few decades, though, they “fell out of love” with the Democratic Party and began regularly putting Republicans in charge of the country.
What happened?
Back in the 1980s, sociologist Diane Vaughan did some remarkable research about how people fall in and out of love that she compiled in her book Uncoupling. Her surprising but commonsense findings, now used by psychotherapists and marriage counselors around the world, apply to politics as much as they do to intimate relationships.
At some point during most relationships, one partner will become dissatisfied with the behavior of the other. When this dissatisfaction is so fundamental that the unhappy partner might consider dissolving the relationship if it’s not changed, they will almost always say something or otherwise signal their dissatisfaction.
This signal of dissatisfaction is referred to by therapists as “the cry,” as in “the announcement” (think town crier, not sobbing). If the “offending” partner ignores or doesn’t understand the gravity of this “cry out” about how the relationship is going, it’s referred to as “the cry unheard.” The most common occurrence is that the partner “hears” the cry, but doesn’t think it’s a big deal and so ignores it; in other cases, it’s missed altogether.
When the “cry” isn’t heard or is misunderstood as a routine small disagreement, the dissatisfied partner will begin noticing other things that are offending, and, over time, compile a list of reasons to leave the relationship that outnumbers the reasons to stay.
Meanwhile, the offending partner—not having heard, or having misunderstood the “cry”—is oblivious and thinks everything is just fine.
The first turning point in the relationship comes when the dissatisfied partner, having put out the cry unheard and not seeing changes in behavior, starts to share the grievance with others, complaining (often subtly) about their partner.
After a (typically relatively short) time, having gotten feedback from others that, “Yes, that behavior would bother me, too,” the dissatisfied partner, concluding the relationship can’t be salvaged, begins an emotional separation process, moving past bargaining and anger into grieving the loss, accepting that the relationship is not salvageable, and then, finally, announcing that they are pulling the plug on the relationship.
Hearing for the first time this announcement that the relationship is dead, the clueless partner who didn’t hear the cry is blindsided, shocked, and devastated. While their partner has already gone through all the stages of unhappiness, deciding to leave, grieving the failure of the relationship, and accepting it as over, the clueless partner is forced to begin the process (similar to Kubler-Ross’ stages of dying) for themselves from a cold start.
Applying this model to the Democratic Party, the first really loud “cry unheard” from the Democratic electorate came in 1992.
Prior to 1992, the Democratic Party had been FDR’s and LBJ’s party of big government, big projects (from legalizing unions to creating Social Security and Medicare to putting a man on the moon), and the great defender of working people.
For example, many Democrats and their union allies strongly opposed Nixon’s 1974 Trade Act (ultimately signed by Gerald Ford) that gave fast-track authority to the president to encourage offshoring American jobs (we’ve lost more than 80,000 factories just since then) by cutting protective tariffs on imports.
I was living in Michigan running an advertising agency and reporting news part-time in the mid-1970s, and I remember well how dangerous it was to drive one of the cheap imported (mostly Japanese) cars that began flooding the country that decade as a result of the Nixon/Ford trade policies.
Working people were furious with the job losses, and when Jimmy Carter didn’t reverse Nixon’s trade policies, they turned to Reagan, who had promised, in the election of 1980, that he would protect workers’ jobs, even securing the endorsement of PATCO, the air controllers union he would famously betray in his first year in office. While union leaders were wary and opposed Reagan, many rank-and-file members believed the charismatic actor.
But instead of standing up for working people, in 1981 Reagan declared war on the unions (then the largest funders of the Democratic Party nationwide), and began negotiations with Mexico and Canada to speed up the rate at which American companies were moving factories and, thus, union jobs out of the U.S.
This picked up steam with the NAFTA agreement itself, which was finalized by the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992, although it was yet to be ratified by Congress.
In 1971, when Walmart was a regional retailer operating in only five states, its stores often had banners proclaiming what became the title of Sam Walton’s autobiography: “Made in America.” By the election year of 1992, four years after Sam had stepped down as CEO, it was getting hard to find anything in a Walmart that was still made in the USA.
And it wasn’t just Walmart—the 1970s trickle of foreign cars had become a flood by the end of the Reagan and Bush years in 1992, and union jobs all across America were vanishing, along with the factories that provided for them.
Thus, the “cry unheard” of America’s working people—most of them Democrats back then (even if they’d had an “affair” with Reagan)—was, “Please stop these insane ‘free trade’ deals that Nixon started and Reagan/Bush put on steroids!”
But by this time the leadership of the Democratic Party wasn’t listening, or dismissed union concerns as something that would pass. As Reagan planned, union jobs evaporated throughout the 1980s and with them went the ability of big unions to support Democratic politicians with either cash or boots-on-the-ground.
With the unions dying under Reagan’s assault, Bill Clinton, planning to run for president in the election of 1992, knew he had to find other sources of financial support (the Supreme Court had opened the floodgates to corporate money in 1976 and 1978, exploding the cost of a presidential campaign). This was before anybody knew how to raise individual contributions on the internet, so Clinton had to figure out how to finance his campaign without relying on the unions.
As Al From lays out in his book The New Democrats and the Return to Power, he and Bill Clinton worked “to rescue the party from the political wilderness, redefine its message, and, most importantly, win presidential elections.” And that would take a lot of cash.
Bank robber Willie Sutton famously said that banks were “where the money is,” and the money available for politics in 1992 had moved from the pockets of working people (wages had been flat for more than a decade) and their unions (unionization was in freefall) into the pockets of banks, insurance companies, drug companies, defense contractors, and other big corporations. And the Supreme Court had legalized taking their money in exchange for favors just before Reagan’s election in 1976 and 1978 (and tripled down on it in 2016).
“In April 1989,” From’s book notes, he “traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas, to recruit the state’s young governor, Bill Clinton, to be chairman of the DLC.” The result of their partnership was the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and a new mantra for the Democratic Party: “[E]conomic centrism, national security, and entitlement reform…” that brought with it a flood of corporate and billionaire money.
The party of big government solutions had become the party of big corporate money.
As a result, that first Clinton election year, 1992, was also the year when the “cry unheard” of American working people became a primal scream.
Nearly one in five voters that year cast a ballot for an eccentric billionaire from Texas, Ross Perot, whose mantra was that the NAFTA free trade agreement negotiated by Reagan/Bush but also supported by the newly baptized DLC chair Clinton would lead to “a giant sucking sound from the South” as factories and jobs moved to Mexico.
Clinton suggested that blue-collar jobs weren’t the future of America, and his running mate, Al Gore, said that moving automotive and other factories to Mexico would actually be good for America because Mexican workers would no longer have an incentive to cross our southern border and “we [could] cut down on illegal immigration.”
The Democratic Party now led by Clinton thus embraced a behavior that most working Americans knew would be a disaster for them, and that they had cried out loudly against with their Perot vote in 1992.
Over the next eight years, as Clinton ignored them, many began considering having another affair with the GOP. After all, if Clinton was going to embrace Reagan/Bush trade policies, why not just go right to the source—the GOP itself—for policy prescriptions.
According to Bob Woodward, during a meeting in the Oval Office, Clinton said sarcastically, “Where are all the Democrats? I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans.”
He added, “We’re Eisenhower Republicans here. Here we are, and we’re standing for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?”
Further turning his back on the FDR/LBJ Democratic Party principles, Clinton went on to heartily embrace Republican policies of cutting the social safety net. “The era of big government is over,” he proclaimed.
Putting the knife hilt-deep into the spine of LBJ’s Great Society, Clinton said, “Today we are ending welfare as we know it” as he signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. That law undid much of LBJ’s Great Society legislation, which had succeeded in cutting poverty rates in America from 22.2 percent in 1963 down to 12.6 percent in 1970.
For the first time since LBJ’s Great Society in the 1960s, families in poverty were not guaranteed a lifeline. They had to prove they were working in order to qualify for assistance, which sounded like a good idea in theory, especially during boom times like the ’90s, when there were lots of jobs available. But during recessions, when three or four people are looking for every one available job, a work requirement for welfare does a lot of harm to already struggling families.
The stats have borne this out. In the years after welfare reform, as a series of presidents and governors have followed in Clinton’s footsteps, ever more people have been kicked off benefits, while poverty has increased. Before Clinton’s “welfare reform,” roughly 70 percent of impoverished families had access to a lifeline. But after reform, by 2016, only 23 percent did, and in some states that number was below 10 percent.
Meanwhile, the Reagan Revolution’s trade policy was wiping out the industrial base of America, while its tax policies were simultaneously moving trillions of dollars in wealth from middle-class families into the pockets of the top 1 percent.
The year Reagan was sworn in, we were the richest nation in the world, and other than a few wobbles during the Civil War and two World Wars, our national debt had been relatively steady in inflation-adjusted dollars since the administration of George Washington. We were the world’s largest creditor—more countries owed us money than any other nation on earth.
Today, after nearly 40 years of neoliberal Reaganomics, we are the world’s largest debtor nation, and our national debt nearly outweighs our annual GDP.
The year Reagan was sworn into office, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world, and the world’s largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. We brought in ores for manufacturing, and shipped out everything from TVs and computers to cars and clothing.
Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world’s mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world’s largest importer of finished, manufactured goods. We’ve gone from trade surpluses to trade deficits, a reflection of the fact that our factory floors had moved to Asia and Mexico.
In 1960, about one in four Americans worked in manufacturing, producing things of lasting wealth for our nation. Today, after jumping headfirst into one free-trade agreement after another, fewer than one in ten Americans work in manufacturing.
Between 2000 and 2017, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. They didn’t disappear; they just moved to low-wage factories in foreign nations.
Ironically, Republican President Eisenhower (1952-1960) knew that Americans loved FDR’s New Deal, and continued FDR’s trade policies. He had, after all, grown up with them (he was born in 1890), and fought World War II as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe under FDR and led the invasion at Normandy.
He told his brother Edgar in a 1954 letter, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”
Eisenhower added, “There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are… Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
But Clinton and the “moderate” DLC Democrats embraced becoming Eisenhower Republicans, even as Eisenhower would have repudiated their policies.
“CLINTON SWIPES THE GOP’S LYRICS” read the headline of a 1996 Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne, which opened with this prescient paragraph:
“‘The good news is that we may elect a Republican president this year,’ said Republican consultant Alex Castellanos. ‘The bad news is that it may be Bill Clinton.’”
The result was the beginning of the Great Uncoupling the Democratic Party experienced in the 1990s, with formerly Democratic-voting working-class and poor people going over to the GOP, a trend we saw continued with Trump’s election.
As Harry Truman once said, “The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat…”
As jobs and economic issues became the exclusive provenance of what the media calls “far-left” politicians like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders, and the leadership of the Democratic Party stayed with Reaganomics, working people generally failed to show up in large enough numbers to keep George W. Bush out of the White House.
But George W. Bush didn’t repudiate Reaganomics, so the working class continued to stagnate economically. Frustrated Americans decided to take another try with the Democrats.
This set up Senator Barack Obama, who promised “hope and change,” to beat John McCain’s “steady as she goes” approach to the presidency.
But, vague rhetoric aside, Obama’s “change” was largely a continuation of Clinton’s Eisenhower-like corporate- and billionaire-friendly DLC policies. He restored dignity and sanity to the presidency, but also pushed hard to expand NAFTA-like outsourcing policies by throwing several years of political capital into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was ultimately as unpopular among a majority of Americans as was NAFTA in 1992. And his support of organized labor was weak, at best.
Since 1981, not one American president has seriously challenged the neoliberal basis of Reaganomics. Billionaires and corporations now largely run our politics, to the point that average working people’s desires are about as likely to be made into law as random chance.
As a result, Pew found that only about half of Americans qualified as “middle class” by the beginning of the Obama presidency. “From 1971 to 2011, the share of adults in the middle class fell by 10 percentage points,” they noted.
With fewer than half of Americans qualifying as middle class by 2015, Pew concluded their study: “The hollowing of the middle has proceeded steadily for the past four decades.” Four decades earlier, of course, the Democratic Party began a course that culminated in Bill Clinton leading the party to turn its back on FDR and LBJ, and embrace Republican-lite economic and trade policies.
Like a partner whose cry was still unheard, America’s still-wounded working-class and newly poor voters decided to take another chance with a new Republican partner, this time a mobbed-up New York City real estate hustler and reality TV star who promised to reverse so-called “free trade” and “bring those jobs home.”
Donald Trump had reached back into the old Democratic playbook, picking up where LBJ (who maintained protective tariffs and brought us Medicare and Medicaid without a single Republican vote) had left off, promising to reinstate protectionist trade policies to bring factories back to America. He also promised to reinstate LBJ’s emphasis on the quality of life for working-class and poor people through a national health insurance plan that would be “better” than Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which was floundering after being gutted by the Supreme Court.
“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump told the Washington Post. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” Then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price added, on “Meet the Press,” that “nobody will be worse off financially” with the new Trumpcare plan. Trump tweeted that there would be “no cuts… to Medicaid” and said that “no one will lose coverage.”
And while Trump’s trade efforts have been ham-handed, his trade war with China is—outside of farming communities—still popular in the industrial heartland, particularly among current and former union workers.
His health care plan was a scam, making available on Obamacare exchanges formerly 90-day (now three-year) emergency “bridge plans” that could still cancel insurance for preexisting conditions. But with the media focused on Trump, horserace and scandal, virtually no Americans realize that the plans Trump pitched as new and cheaper are so dangerous.
Thus, working-class whites in the American Midwest and South, even those not in thrall to Trump’s pitch to white supremacists, are largely staying with him. Hope springs eternal, after all, and dies last. The Democratic Party is still locked out of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House, even after two of the past four presidents who served for eight years each were Democrats.
Which brings us to how relationships heal and couples reunite, and how this could be applied to save the soul and electoral outcomes of the Democratic Party.
When the partner who had ignored the “cry” now hears it, there’s a very real chance that the relationship can be saved. Doing so requires two steps, both done with a lot of commitment and hard work.
First, change the offensive behavior.
Second, remember why you “fell in love” in the first place, and revisit those reasons, experiences, feelings, and activities that first brought you together.
Democrats know how to do both of these things, party leadership notwithstanding.
The Democratic Party had built a three-generation governing majority once in the past. All they need do today is reimplement Democratic policies from 1933 to 1979, updated for modern times.
Raise taxes on the rich, bring our factories home, expand the safety net, support GI Bill-style free education, and restore union rights. The party should know its history, after all, and should remember how well it was received by the American people.
Like a partner who wants to repair a wounded relationship, the Democrats must return to core principles and stay faithful to them. And we still have the template.
Today, the Democratic Party has two presidential nominees who carry the values and economic policies of FDR and LBJ, while embracing modern-day values of diversity and inclusion in ways neither party dared before this century. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is the second-largest Democratic caucus and the third largest in all of Congress.
If the Democratic Party follows its base and promotes progressive candidates and policies, it has a good chance of pulling America back from the brink of authoritarianism and oligarchy, and to restore our moral authority in the world. A return to big thinking and big goals like those of FDR and LBJ will put Democrats on a track to a second multigenerational governing majority.
If the party uses its convention and superdelegates (on a second vote) to choose another candidate committed to DLC (now Third Way) policies, get ready for either another four years of Donald Trump or a “moderate” one-term pause in the continuing deterioration of the middle-class American Dream.
Thom Hartmann is a former psychotherapist, SiriusXM talk-show host and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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http://www.risingupwithsonali.com/2019/06/24/thom-hartmann-discusses-the-hidden-history-of-guns-in-america-extended-interview/
The United States stands out from much of the world today in proliferating firearms at a rate that is breathtaking. The vocal demands of a gun-loving minority have led to tens of thousands of deaths a year. High profile mass shootings, particularly on school campuses, lead to outpourings of “thoughts and prayers,” but little else. Members of Congress cower in the face of the powerful gun lobby and shrug their shoulders in helplessness. We are all told over and over again that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is supreme over our right to safety. Now a new book puts the American obsession with guns into a much-needed political and historical framework.
For more information about Thom Hartmann’s ‘The Hidden History of Guns and the 2nd Amendment’ book tour visit www.thomhartmann.com.
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i I was booted from Facebook for no discernible reason. Is it time to rein in the massive power it wields?
Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Ins
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no lnx
How Citizens United corrupted the US Supreme Court and guaranteed Republicans will never turn on Trump
President Donald J. Trump honors Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell during the federal judicial confirmation milestones event, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute December 4, 2019
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
There is a very simple reason why some Republicans voted for the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon, but none have so far broken ranks against Trump. That reason is a corrupted U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1976 (Buckley v. Valeo) and 1978 (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti), the Supreme Court ruled that when corporations and billionaires purchase their very own politicians, it is constitutionally protected “free speech” rather than “bribery,” which is how we defined it from the beginning of our republic until 1976. In 2010, the Supreme Court doubled down on its betrayal of American democracy with its Citizens United decision.
After those twin decisions in the 1970s, money from corporations and the morbidly rich began to flow into the coffers of the Republican Party, hoisting Ronald Reagan into the White House. (Democrats were then still largely funded by unions, and thus not so easily up for sale.)
The spigots of cash never turned off; the 2016 election was a $6.5 billion affair.
As a result, today’s Republican politicians are wholly owned agents of corporations and the billionaire class, stoking extreme anger over a few social issues (immigration, guns, God, gays, race) and using it to bring in the Fox rubes that the billionaire Murdochs kindly hand them.
Prior to this betrayal of America by the Supreme Court, politicians generally felt a need to respond to the wants and needs of their constituents. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s people-powered election in 1932 to Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, politicians’ proposed legislation and votes tended to reflect what the people in their districts or states wanted.
Nixon’s impeachment hearings happened in 1974, before the Supreme Court legalized bribery—and so the Senate voted 77-0 to forward the investigation, and the House voted 412-3 to accept the Judiciary Committee’s report showing “clear and convincing evidence” of Nixon’s corruption. Republicans were more concerned about their voters than about their donors back then.
From the 1980s to today, though, as a study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page shows, the political desires of the economic bottom 90 percent of Americans are completely irrelevant to the introduction or passage of legislation. But the desires of the top 10 percent of Americans are consistently passed into law and policy.
Republicans don’t want the money to stop, so they have to keep supporting Trump as he pushes the corporate- and billionaire-friendly policies of deregulation and tax cuts supported by their donors.
When the billionaires abandon Trump, so will the GOP.
It’s really just that simple.
As long as the Supreme Court continues to assert that there is absolutely nothing wrong with billionaires and corporations owning politicians, the GOP will continue to be an extension of the lobbying industry and the morbidly rich. In exchange for deregulation and tax cuts, that bunch would work to keep a gerbil in the White House, if that’s what it took.
And as long as their owners and funders continue to pay Republicans to keep Trump in office, they’ll continue to say, “How high?” every time Trump yells, “Jump!”
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/revenge-of-the-billionaires-how-an-oligarchy-of-the-morbidly-rich-can-take-down-democracy/
...no lnx
by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute November 22, 2019
The current issue of the Atlantic magazine founded itself in the years just before the Civil War, is ominously titled, “How to Stop a Civil War.”
If we are, indeed, on the brink of a second Civil War, it’s already being waged as a “cold war,” with the occasional armed skirmish being provoked by the so-called alt-right movement. And, as in the past, this will be a war by the very, very rich against the rest of America.
This is not the first time we’ve faced such a crisis as a nation.
Each time, forces of massive accumulated or inherited wealth have nearly succeeded in taking full control of our nation, replacing a democracy, where the will of the people is accomplished through their elected representatives, with a form of government where most government functions reinforce the power, wealth and control of the morbidly rich.
This system of government is among the most ancient, stretching back 7,000 years, and is known to political scientists as oligarchy. Aristotle put it in context: “Tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy…”
...
oligarchy to totally take down democracy, only three things are initially needed:
Control of (or substantial influence over) a critical portion of the media
Legalization of bribery of public officials, so oligarchs can achieve majority control of the legislative process
Control of the most critical parts of the court system so they can control legal processes
A fourth element, once the oligarchy is well established, is the formation of a police state, principally using selective prosecution against those agitating for a return to democracy.
Arnold Toynbee is said to have noted that “When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.” Most warriors are in their late teens or early 20s; by the time they’ve died, three more generations have come of age, suggesting, if Toynbee was right, a four-generation gap between “great wars.”
In their book The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous With Destiny, William Strauss and Neil Howe apply the theory to the United States. The Revolutionary War began in 1775; 86 years later in 1861, the Civil War began; 78 years later in 1939, America was combatting “the twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II,” write Strauss and Howe, adding: “Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with” these crises.
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The three crises did not simply come out of nowhere; cycles of events had been building for the preceding generations to create the context for each.
In the 1770s, foreign-aligned oligarchs controlled what we now call America; believers in democracy fought a war to overthrow that British oligarchy.
Four generations later, in the 1850s, massive wealth was controlled by a few thousand very large plantation oligarchs in the South. The South was politically and police-wise run as a full-blown oligarchy, while the North was still largely democratic (the “Gilded Age” Northern oligarchs wouldn’t fully emerge for another 30 years). The Civil War could thus be recast as a war between oligarchy and democracy, where democracy won by a whisker.
About four generations after that, in 1921, Warren Harding and his oligarch supporters took control of our federal government, leading to the “Roaring Twenties” (in which working people’s wages stagnated, but people at the top made out like bandits), and the Great Crash of 1929. The Republican Great Depression (what they called it until the 1950s) opened the door to Franklin Roosevelt’s “war” against the “economic royalists” (oligarchs), which succeeded in putting them, at least temporarily, in a box despite their explicit efforts, exposed by Marine General Smedley Butler, to overthrow him by force.
In 2019, it’s been about four generations since that battle—and the groundwork has been laid for another crisis.
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In the 1970s, America’s oligarchs succeeded in getting enough of “their guys” placed on the Supreme Court to, in 1976 and 1978, legalize political bribery for the first time in American history. This opened the door to oligarchic control of all three branches of government via the Reagan Revolution.
All that was left was to get the populace to support a final transition to oligarchy, a task undertaken by oligarchs who controlled the media, largely Clear Channel/Rush Limbaugh and billionaire Rupert Murdoch with Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.
As a result, we are no longer a functioning democratic republic; we are now operating as an oligarchy.
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The argument for oligarchic control is the same argument that’s been made by “conservatives” through history, from Thomas Hobbes to Sir Edmund Burke to Warren Harding and Donald Trump:
“With us in charge, we will keep you safe and happy and you really don’t need to concern yourself with the complicated work of governance. You don’t want to ‘tear down’ or ‘shake up’ the system: having a stable group of very wealthy people control the government has always led to the greatest level of stability and peace—look how stable Europe was for a thousand years when royal families and their landed gentry ruled. We’re the ones chosen by God or a brilliant DNA lineage to lead. Just go shopping and leave things to us.”
Starting in the 1980s, oligarchy was sold to us by “conservative” religious figures (“Saint Reagan,” G.W. Bush was a godly man, Trump is King Cyrus, John Calvin was right that being rich is a sign of God’s blessing so nations are best run by rich people), as well as oligarch-owned media.
Starting in the past decade, this sales pitch has extended itself to a massive social media ecosystem majority-owned by a handful of American oligarchs, some of whom have expressed confusion about democratic governance and all of whom have directly or indirectly bought control of large numbers of local, state and federal legislators.
This led us from the “oligarch-friendly” President Reagan, to the conversion, in 1992, of the Democratic Party via the Democratic Leadership Council to become “oligarch-friendly” itself (a legacy it’s today struggling to undo). In 2016, oligarchs like Robert Mercer and Charles Koch finally put an oligarch himself, Donald Trump, in the White House.
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When, in 2015, I asked former President Jimmy Carter what he thought the consequences were of Supreme Court decisions like Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United that made all this possible, he replied:
“It [the Citizens United decision] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and Congress members.
“So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”
That same year, then-Vice President Joe Biden said, “you have to go where the money is. Now where the money is, there’s almost always implicitly some string attached. … It’s awful hard to take a whole lot of money from a group you know has a particular position, then you conclude they’re wrong [and] vote no.”
As former Vice President Al Gore wrote in his 2013 book The Future: “American democracy has been hacked. … The United States Congress … is now incapable of passing laws without permission from the corporate lobbies and other special interests that control their campaign finances.”
And, in 2015 while campaigning for the Republican nomination for president, oligarch Donald Trump candidly said, “I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me.”
In 2014, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (Princeton, Northwestern) demonstrated that we ceased to be a functioning democracy by classical definitions sometime in the late 20th century, and have been, as President Carter said, an oligarchy (my term, not theirs: they call it “Economic-Elite Domination”) since then.
The difference between now and the 1860s is that the oligarchic control is no longer regional; it’s national. Instead of the North and the South fighting each other, it’s now Free Speech TV viewers facing off with their Fox News–viewing neighbors.
The Koch oligarchy machine, for example, has branches in every state, and pretty much every county. Oligarchy-supporting media are ubiquitous.
And now Very Serious People are talking about the possibility of a second Civil War.
What they’re not pointing out, though, is that it won’t just be a war of white supremacists and Trump cultists against the rest of us, as they generally narrate, but a war between those comfortable with oligarchy (indeed, embracing it, as it promises them safety and stability) versus those who believe in democracy.
This is a crisis point for our nation as real and critical as those we hit in 1776, 1861, and 1932. In each of those three cases—roughly four generations apart—the oligarchs lost the battle. This time they could win.
America needs an honest discussion of what’s really going on in this country right now, what the real conflict is, and who the real players are (and why they’re playing). The conflict is playing out on a series of meta-layers (race, class, religion, regionality), all designed to conceal the real war the oligarchs are waging against democracy itself, and those conflicts will continue to intensify until one side or the other has won what is now still a “cold war.”
Then comes the threat of a real Civil War breaking out, and an informed populace is the best defense against it.
If the forces of democracy can succeed in seizing enough power to temporarily hobble the oligarchs, then they need to immediately restore local control to the media (undoing the 1996 Telecommunications Act and breaking up the media conglomerates) and reinstate a ban on the “right” of oligarchs to own politicians and political parties by overturning several Supreme Court decisions since 1976. Repairing the damage done to our court systems will take longer, but needs to begin immediately.
On the other hand, if the oligarchs decide to promote an actual “hot” Civil War on the forces of democracy—as Southern oligarchs did in 1861—then parts of America that are still functioning democracies (California comes to mind—there has been discussion of various “compacts” between the three West Coast states, possibly joining with a few Eastern Seaboard states) must consider some form of independence, whether it be “soft independence” like California declared when they established their own air quality standards or some form of partial independence or succession.
This moment of oligarchy-caused crisis is a time of great danger to America, and, thus, also to still-functioning democracies all over the world.
As oligarchs reach out and extend their control over nation after nation (now having seized, in just the past few decades, either soft or hard control over Russia, India, the Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, and dozens of other nations) the battlegrounds are shifting to Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France.
Because the oligarch’s campaign is now international, a third world war is not impossible, particularly as China allies itself with the oligarch-controlled nations against those that are still functioning or nearly functioning democracies.
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
This article was produced by Economy for All,...
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/radio-host-thom-hartmann-explains-how-we-could-slide-into-straight-fascism-in-the-next-year
...one one thing that causes me to think that we might not — and which is the subject of my new book “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” — is how the United States Supreme Court has basically betrayed our country. The definition of a democracy is where the people vote for what they want and then they get that through the government. That has not been the case since 1981.
Whether it’s the social safety net, protecting the environment, decreasing our military activity abroad, making policing more humane, recognizing civil rights, encouraging voter rights, strengthening the middle class and protecting Social Security and Medicare, none of those things have happened. In fact, the opposite has happened.
How is Trumpism a symptom and not the cause of much bigger social, political, economic and other cultural problems in America? Renewing the country’s democracy to prevent another fascist president is going to require deep systemic change, not just voting Donald Trump out of office.
The thing that concerns me the most is that in the United States we now have corporations and billionaires who have taken over our political system completely. Social scientists have shown that what the bottom 90% of income earners want in America is literally random noise for America’s policymakers. By comparison, what the top 10% want is consistently enacted through legislation. This means no more democracy. And then on top of that power dynamic the courts have swung to the far right and are hard corporatist.....
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/from-nixon-to-trump-heres-how-ideologues-and-partisans-seized-the-court/
dirksen torpedo peac talks]
...While there are many ways our republic would probably be different today had Nixon not committed treason to get elected in 1968, the most consequential has been the Supreme Court.
Nixon got four conservative appointments: Warren E. Burger, William Rehnquist, Harry Blackmun, and, most consequentially, Lewis Powell. Nixon’s vice president, Gerald Ford, appointed a fifth conservative justice, John Paul Stevens, after Nixon resigned in 1974.
Without Nixon, Lewis Powell may never have been on the Court. Powell’s enduring Court legacy will be how he helped big money take over our government as the guiding force behind the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo and First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti cases. Followed by Citizens United in 2010, they essentially handed our elections over to the highest bidders.
Reprinted from The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America with the permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Copyright © 2019 by Thom Hartmann.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/ronald-reagan-launched-an-attack-on-the-middle-class-we-must-reverse-it-to-save-our-democracy/
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Ronald Reagan launched an attack on the middle class. We must reverse it to save our democracy
Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute October 2, 2019
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/some-of-trumps-allies-and-officials-must-face-federal-prosecution-to-save-the-republic/
no lnx
Some of Trump’s allies and officials must face federal prosecution — to save the republic
Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute September 10, 2019
To save our republic, some of Trump’s enablers and political appointees may have to go to jail, just like happened with Nixon’s people.
Trump’s policies are inflicting massive damage on the working class, the environment, minorities, and our economy. And the damage he’s doing to our body politic will certainly alter our form of government if there aren’t legal consequences.
Trump and his cronies have shown present and future politicians how much corruption the Republican Party and the public will tolerate, and it’s a very bad sign for the future of the American experiment.
Trump has put the interests of foreign governments with whom he and his family have or hope to have business relationships above the interests of America; flagrantly violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause; welcomed foreign interference in our elections; lied to the American public and the world on a daily basis; committed campaign finance violations that landed his lawyer in prison; repeatedly broke obstruction of justice laws; and put children in cages, causing lifelong PTSD.
And that’s just since he’s been in office: his crimes from housing discrimination to sexual assault and rape to felony tax evasion to running a fraudulent university to real estate tax fraud are all, as of this moment, largely or entirely lacking any serious law enforcement oversight.
America has never before seen such breathtaking corruption in the Oval Office.
While this has rightly sparked an extended conversation about impeachment and the powers of the executive branch, a more important conversation—that’s entirely lacking in mainstream media—is about the people enabling Trump’s corruption and criminality. If he and the people enabling him are not held to account, future Trumps are pretty much inevitable.
Numerous countries have grappled with this issue in the past; the most famous are Germany after World War II and South Africa after the fall of apartheid.
It was this cycle of corruption that both the Nurnberg Tribunal and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission sought to interrupt. Today the Colombian government is running a War Crimes Tribunal specifically to warn future politicians and their functionaries from repeating the crimes committed during that nation’s previous administration.
In America, congressional investigations into the Teapot Dome Scandal nearly brought down the Harding administration (it was widely believed that President Harding died as a result of the stress), and Congress launched an impeachment proceeding against President Bill Clinton for lying about consensual sex with Monica Lewinsky, as then-Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia said on the floor of the House, “in order to establish a precedent that will prevent future Presidents from engaging in similar conduct.”
By holding current-day accomplices accountable all up and down the chain of command, future enablers of corrupt or despotic leaders think twice before saying “Yes” to requests to bend or break the rules.
At its core, this is the essence of the rule of law.
Trump has put people with naked conflicts of interest in charge of major government departments and in Cabinet positions, and browbeaten other federal agencies to reroute federal dollars to his businesses or lie to help him out politically.
His attorney general, Bill Barr, has outdone his corruption in the George H.W. Bush administration, and is now using the power of his office to try to force California and other states to loosen their clean air regulations in ways that will benefit the fossil fuel donors to the GOP—at exactly the moment scientists are warning that global warming could destroy human civilization.
And these are just a few of dozens of examples of the ways that enablers within our government—from Trump’s Cabinet to his Press Office all the way down the chain of command—have been willing to lie, bend or break the rules, or simply engage in highly corrupt acts to please him.
Often, as with Trump’s promotion of violence and racial hatred, these acts aren’t even explicitly illegal—they’re simply so brazen and implicitly corrupt that no other administration in the past would have considered doing them.
After the Nixon bribery scandals (there were 55 criminal convictions around Nixon, 16 each for Reagan and George W. Bush; one for Clinton and none for Carter or Obama), Congress passed legislation designed to prevent corruption and criminality by future presidents and other politicians. With five criminal convictions or guilty pleas by top Trump insiders so far, there’s little doubt that new laws or policies to restrain such behavior in the White House will be necessary when Trump leaves office.
And, like the 15 Nixon administration officials who went to prison, there are numerous as-yet-unindicted Trump functionaries who have facilitated these crimes and corrupt practices.
As I point out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, candidate Richard Nixon interfered with President Johnson’s efforts to negotiate peace in Vietnam; candidate Ronald Reagan interfered with President Carter’s efforts to free hostages in Iran; and George H.W. Bush loyalists on the Supreme Court corruptly disrupted the electoral process in Florida to install Bush’s son in the White House.
If Nixon had been held to account, Reagan and Bush may not have been so brazen in their willingness to subvert American democracy for political purposes and to help their campaign donors.
Their ability to get away with such corruption to win elections paved the way for Trump’s welcoming—indeed, soliciting—help from Russia and other foreign governments to become president. And now he’s even shut down the last “cop on the beat” for the 2020 election by crippling the Federal Election Commission. Furthermore, his chief enabler, #MoscowMitch McConnell, is blocking any legislation that will prevent our election infrastructure from being hacked while forestalling consequences by injecting more manifestly unqualified or corrupt people into our judicial bloodstream than during any administration in history.
Similarly, the unwillingness of the Obama administration to investigate and publicly hold Bush and Cheney accountable for lying to the American people about Iraq and committing numerous war crimes emboldens Trump when it comes to the possibility of war with Iran or Venezuela. The choice to do little or nothing about the crimes and corruption of a previous administration, as was made by both Clinton and Obama, is also an explicit act that has its own consequences.
Trump and his functionaries are setting an example for future presidents and their administrations that goes deeper than even electoral or war crimes; they’ve turned America (hopefully, temporarily) into a larger version of a strongman banana republic. Without corrective action, future presidents will feel a strong temptation—regardless of their political party or positions—to cut corners and break laws.
When not punished, this sort of corruption echoes down generations of leaders in countries on both the right and the left; no politician is immune to temptation and pressure when working in what’s perceived as a consequence-free environment.
Now is the time to begin a conversation about how Trump’s enablers will be held to account, to bring post-Trump America back into the realm of a functioning democratic republic.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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The right-wing love affair with Ayn Rand ties conservatism to one of the most disturbing sociopathic killers
Ayn Rand image via Wikipedia
Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute August 12, 2019
There’s a direct link between a sociopathic killer in 1927 and the GOP’s willingness to embrace a sociopathic president like Trump. That link runs through the work of Ayn Rand.
When Donald Trump was running for the GOP nomination, he told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, The Fountainhead, was his favorite book.
“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”
Trump probably knew that anything by Rand would be the right answer for Republicans; the party has embraced her for decades, to the point that Paul Ryan required interns to read her books as a condition of employment.
Powers added, “He [Trump] identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.” Roark raged so much in the novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get his way.
Rand was quite clear about the characteristics she wrote into her heroes, and in particular Howard Roark. In her Journals, she writes of the theme of the book, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine!”
On Howard Roark, she writes that he “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”
Roark seems like the kind of man who would brag about grabbing women by the genitals because, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” But this was long before Donald Trump was on the scene.
Instead, the man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was a real sociopath named William Edward Hickman, who lived in Los Angeles.
Ten days before Christmas, in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles, California, and kidnapped Marion Parker—the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.
Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father—back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”
After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.
The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.
“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”
Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.
“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”
But Hickman wasn’t finished. “After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”
Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.
He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.
On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.
Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.
Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.
To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.
But to a young Russian idealist just arriving in America, Hickman was a hero.
And while Hickman the man has, today, been largely forgotten, Hickman the archetype has lived on and influenced our nation in a profound fashion, paving the way for Donald Trump, a man with no empathy or consideration of social norms, to one day occupy the White House.
The kind of man who would pose with a tiny baby, the youngest survivor of a slaughter that he, himself encouraged with his hateful rhetoric, and mug for the camera with a thumbs-up sign.
Two years before William Edward Hickman was sentenced to death, a 21-year-old Russian political science student named Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum arrived in New York Harbor on a French ocean liner. The year was 1926, and she was on the last leg of her dream trip to the Land of Opportunity, scurrying across the Soviet Union, Germany, and France before procuring a first-class cabin aboard the S.S. De Grasse, bound for the United States.
Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. And etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.
She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners—the people who were rich with Russian money like Donald Trump—by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she witnessed Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy business, loot the store, and plaster on the doors the red emblem of the state indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”
That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind, that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.
Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.
He was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved a level of national fame she craved—William Edward Hickman.
What young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman that would encourage her to base a novel, then her philosophy, then her life’s work, on him was quite straightforward: unfeeling, unpitying selfishness.
He was the kind of man who would revel in the pain parents would feel when their children were ripped from their arms and held in freezing cages for over a year.
In Hickman, Ayn Rand wrote that she had finally found the new model of the Superman (her phrase, likely borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche). Only a worldview held by a man like Hickman, she believed, could ever prevent an all-powerful state from traumatizing another generation of small businesspeople and their children as the Bolsheviks had her family.
Hickman’s words as recounted by Rand in her Journals, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else—even above friends, family, or nation—the result would be utopian.
She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”
Hickman—the monster who boasted of how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl—had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.
As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the mediocre American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman, much like today people Trump calls mediocre condemn him and the killings that may have emerged from his rhetoric, from Charleston to Charlottesville to El Paso.
“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”
Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote, “It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”
In other words, a man who lives exclusively for himself. A narcissistic psychopath. A man who could sell out his own country to foreign powers, tearing apart his nation’s people, just for his own enjoyment.
Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”
The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that could transform a nation.
“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”
The kind of man who would tell over 12,000 lies in two and a half years, who would daily lie to the press and his nation, just because he could—and would revel in it.
Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution, just like they’d caused Fred Trump to be arrested and fined for refusing to maintain apartments that black people had moved into.
Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found in the extremes her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich—the rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good. Only billionaires should rule the world, as Trump has suggested.
Trump personifies this, putting an advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA, an oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. His chief of staff said that putting children in cages (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good. Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.
Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”
She, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband, and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.
Like Trump and his billionaire backers, she believed that a government promoting working-class “looters” instead of solely looking out for capitalist “producers” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.
In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security—particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes)—was morally reprehensible.
Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game—selfishness is next to godliness.
Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace.
Suggesting that selfishness undermines most American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.
“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”
As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.”
“We’re taught to feel concerned for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged, “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other—now why do you rebel?”
“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered. She added, “[man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”
Rand’s philosophy, though growing in popularity on college campuses, never did—in her lifetime—achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. It was confined to college coffee shops, intellectual conferences, and true-believer journals, but never hit the halls of Congress, the mainstream television airwaves, or water-cooler political debates. There were the handful of “true believers,” but that was it… until today.
Now, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and the president of the United States.
Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer, and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a sociopathic narcissist president.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-fascist-foot-soldiers-are-armed-to-the-teeth-with-weapons-of-war/
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The latest massacre shows the 2nd Amendment model of ‘slave patrols’ is still in effect
Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1198949239 NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 26, 2018: Donald Trump, the President of the United States addresses reporters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly at the Lotte Palace Hotel.
Written by Thom Hartmann / Common Dreams August 6, 2019
While, in the wake of the El Paso murders, the media and most of our politicians are acting shocked—“shocked, I tell you!”—that there are armed racists in America who are trying to terrify people of color, the reality is that it’s pretty much always been that way here in the United States. And until white Americans and the media they control acknowledge that simple history, we won’t be able to do the things we must to change it.
While we need rational gun control, this isn’t a gun control issue.
While we need economic security to be more widely shared, this isn’t an economic issue.
While we need universal, free, high-quality K-PhD education, this isn’t an education issue.
While the Republican Party needs to repudiate the “Southern Strategy” that has animated their racist base since 1968, this isn’t a political issue.
Encompassing all of the above, what we are confronting in America right now is the continuation of policies put into place by white people, to control and exploit Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, since the arrival of Africans in 1619 and the codification of slavery into North American law in 1662.
The institution of slavery can only exist in a police state. Without a constantly vigilant and well-armed force of men (and the rare, occasional woman) patrolling the towns and roads, slaves will rebel and put an end to their own enslavement.
As Sally Hadden notes in her brilliant book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, slaveholding regions had institutionalized police-patrol systems specifically to “regulate” enslaved persons more than 100 years before American independence.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, the colonial government passed laws in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their white male employees to be members of the Georgia militia and those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who might be planning uprisings.
As Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Davis Law Review in 1998, “The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search ‘all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition’ and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.”
James Madison even rewrote the Second Amendment into its current form during the 1788 Virginia Ratifying Convention in response to that state’s largest slaveholder, Patrick Henry, demanding that Virginia’s slave patrols be explicitly protected.
While slavery as an institution was abolished after the Civil War by the 13th Amendment (“except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”), the organized and systematic domination of people of color for the benefit of whites continues to this day. And the enforcers of that system—both formal and informal—are still very much with us.
State prisons legally enslaving “duly convicted” persons of color; Klan riders and lynching “parties”; cops killing black men for selling loose cigarettes or murdering black children for playing with toy guns; mass shooters raving about “invasion” by Hispanics; white men enforcing segregation by killing black men and boys who look ator date white women: These are the modern incarnations of the old slave patrols that most Americans recognize.
Less easily recognized is the patrolling of America’s economic racial divide, from Trump employees marking “C” for “colored” on rental applications so people of color could be denied residence, to the rigorous application of property tax funding for schools to keep poor districts poor, millions of individual corporate actions and thousands of state and local laws still conspire to “patrol” people of color.
Like his presidential hero Andrew Jackson (nickname: “Indian Killer”), who owned enslaved people and bragged about murdering Native American women and children, Donald Trump speaks to an exclusively white audience, in this era via Twitter and a TV network that, judging from the ratings, programs exclusively to white people.
From “very fine people” who are literally Nazis and white supremacists, to “I’ll pay for your lawyer” calls for violence, to barely speaking in code with words like “invasion” and “infestation,” Trump has cranked up a new generation of white men who, in previous centuries on this continent, would have been enthusiastic members of the police state that protected slavery from rebellion.
The slave patrols never really went away. And the slave patrollers are finding in Trump the president they’ve been missing since Andrew Jackson passed away.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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https://kpfa.org/episode/the-ralph-nader-radio-hour-july-22-2019/
thom mentions corp personhood
jrnl corn? found NNN word --> bussing --> tax cuts (understoood that they help whites and hurts blks)
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-a-trojan-horse-project-to-rewrite-our-constitution-could-actually-happen-if-trump-wins-in-2020/
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How a Trojan horse project to rewrite our Constitution could actually happen if Trump wins in 2020
President Donald J. Trump shakes hands with the 44th President of the United States, Barack H. Obama during the 58th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol Building, Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. More than 5,000 military members from across all branches of the armed forces of the United States, including Reserve and National Guard components, provided ceremonial support and Defense Support of Civil Authorities during the inaugural period. (DoD photo by U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Cristian L. Ricardo)
written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute July 17, 2019
It’s often said that if Trump is reelected, it’ll be the end of democracy in America. But how could Trump get reelected, and how could democracy get wiped out in the USA?
Turns out, there’s an actual project to rewrite our Constitution, turning America into a corporate-run oligarchy.
They’d end the income tax, eliminate federal regulatory agencies like the EPA, end all labor protections (including laws against child labor), let states ignore anti-discrimination and other federal regulations, and impose term limits so the only “institutional memory” for legislatures will be the corporate lobbyists.
All it needs to succeed—within just a few short years—is for Trump and the GOP to win big in 2020. And the prospects of that happening are going up every day. With a big Trump win will come a rewrite of our Constitution itself, if the billionaires funding it have their way.
But how could he win? With another $2 billion worth of free publicity, just like in 2016.
One example is how Trump’s reelection campaign got a great boost recently when the media, just like in 2016, went all-Trump-all-the-time around his ICE raids, and when he told four congresswomen of color to “go home” to the countries of their ancestors—a racist trope for centuries.
The ICE raids were merely arrests of undocumented people who actually have committed crimes (beyond crossing the border) and currently have legal deportation orders already in place; they’re arrests like the ones Presidents Bush and Obama did daily.
There was nothing unique about them, and year over year, Trump has actually deported fewer people than Obama did.
But Trump tweeted the media into a frenzy, and like obedient hounds, they frantically ran after the bits of hamburger he threw their way.
As Ayanna Pressley noted Monday, the media shouldn’t “take the bait.” Nonetheless, literally every week—virtually every day—since Trump was elected, he’s gotten the media to put his name on the front page of the nation’s newspapers and at the top of the TV news shows.
And in America, as P.T. Barnum (whom Trump has cited as a role model) said, it doesn’t matter if publicity is positive or negative, “As long as they spell my name right.” And they always spell Trump’s name right.
As we saw with the 2015–2016 Republican primary, that Barnum-like daily publicity was all he needed to take down an entire field of competent, professional, and well-financed Republicans. Taking down Democrats may be even easier if he can paint the Democrats with his “open borders” and “Soviet-style socialism” lies (among others).
NBC trained Trump well; they spent millions teaching him how to do a reality show, from cliff-hangers to pitting “heroes” against “goats.” It’s one of the few things he’s actually good at. And instead of his old “Apprentice” weekly show, he’s now producing a daily show from the White House.
But to what end?
It’s looking more and more like the endgame here for Trump—and the right-wing billionaires who support him and the GOP—is not just to get reelected, but to actually rewrite our Constitution and end the American experiment.
The group leading this charge for the billionaires is called Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG), which SourceWatch.org says, “is a right-wing political organization … that is campaigning for an Article V convention to amend the U.S. Constitution.”
SourceWatch notes that, “Through its ‘Convention of States’ project, CSG promotes an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution pursuant to Article V, which provides that thirty-four states (two-thirds) can trigger a convention to propose an amendment, which must then be ratified by 38 states (three-fourths).”
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They add, CSG director Eric O’Keefe “has deep ties to Charles and David Koch and has been a founder and funder of numerous right-wing groups including Wisconsin Club for Growth,” and the CSG, “Through its Convention of States project, is pushing for a constitutional convention in order to severely restrict federal power, for example by redefining the Commerce Clause to prohibit Congress from enacting child labor or anti-discrimination laws, or by adding a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.”
And they’re actually doing it, complete with annual dress rehearsals in the Washington, D.C., area. As Wikipedia notes:
“In December 2013, nearly 100 legislators from 32 states met at Mount Vernon to talk about how to call a convention of states. … In February 2014, U.S. Senator Tom Coburn announced that after his retirement from Congress, he would focus on promoting the Convention of States to state legislatures.
“In December 2015, Marco Rubio endorsed CSG’s efforts to a call [for] an Article V Convention. In January 2016, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called for a Convention of States to restrict the power of the federal government.”
And their rehearsals now include delegates from every state in the union.
Wikipedia notes:
“In September 2016, CSG held a simulated convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution in Williamsburg, Virginia. An assembly of 137 delegates representing every state gathered to conduct a simulated convention. The simulated convention passed amendments relating to six topics, including requiring the states to approve any increase in the national debt, imposing term limits, restricting the scope of the Commerce Clause [to its original meaning], limiting the power of federal regulations, requiring a supermajority to impose federal taxes and repealing the 16th Amendment [end the income tax], and giving the states the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation, or executive order.”
The Convention of States website notes that as of 2019, 15 states have signed on, and enough to hit the critical 38 are lined up, just waiting for right-wing billionaire takeovers of their state legislatures.
And taking over state legislatures in 2020 just became a huge priority for those billionaires because of the recent Supreme Court decision legalizing radical gerrymandering. Expect hundreds of millions of dollars to pour into state legislative and gubernatorial races (thanks to Citizens United), with virtually no opposing funding from the handful of left-wing billionaires.
Progress to rewrite our Constitution was slow but steady when Georgia’s legislature was the first state to join, in March of 2014. States that signed on before Trump’s election included Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.
Since Trump took over the White House, however, they’ve added Arizona, North Dakota, Texas, Missouri, and, just in the first three months of 2019, Arkansas, Utah, and Mississippi.
As of now, the call for a Convention to rewrite the Constitution has also passed at least one chamber of the legislatures in New Mexico, Mississippi, Iowa, South Dakota, Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, and New Hampshire.
And with Trump in power, the Convention of States website notes that just this year (2019) they are working to bring in Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia, Illinois and Hawaii.
If Trump is as successful in manipulating the media as he was in 2016, and the GOP can ride his coattails (along with hundreds of millions from right-wing billionaires) to sweep the Democratic-controlled states they’re targeting, they could hit the 38 states needed to replace the Constitution in the first year or two after his reelection (there are 40 states in the lists above).
A probably apocryphal quote often attributed to Arnold Toynbee says, “When the last man who remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.”
Similarly, when the last American who remembers how quickly democratic constitutions were replaced in Europe in the 1930s dies, the replacement of democracy in America becomes inevitable.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/trump-and-the-gop-are-blatantly-encouraging-foreign-dictators-to-hack-the-2020-election/
It looks like Donald Trump and the leadership of the GOP are encouraging other countries to hack our upcoming 2020 election.
Donald Trump is sucking up to dictators, strongman oligarchs, and autocrats around the world, while Mitch McConnell is using political brute force to prevent individual states from hardening their election systems. Why?
Looking at the entire picture in context, consider Karl Marx’s favorite question: “Who benefits?”
Who benefits when the leaders of countries with sophisticated internet hacking capabilities (North Korea, Saudi Arabia) and no democratic oversight are told by Trump that as long as he’s in office he has their backs?
Might Trump and McConnell hope they’ll intervene in our election to keep in power a political party that now disdains democracy and a free press, and embraces dictatorial behavior like calling for the imprisonment of Trump’s political rivals, and of individuals in the intelligence agencies who have investigated him and the GOP?
Who benefits when countries with world-class internet hacking capabilities and less-than-democratic (Russia) or highly corrupted and oligarch-dependent (Netanyahu, Duterte, Modi) leaders become “good friends” of Trump and/or help Trump build or brand properties in their countries?
Might they intervene in our election directly or indirectly to keep in power an administration that both openly disdains the concept of “liberal democracy” and disrespects leaders of the largely European countries that practice it?
Why would Trump joke with Putin in front of the world about the possibility of Russians hacking American voting systems in the 2020 election? Is he expecting it, or just hoping for it?
Who benefits when mostly “red” states keep their voting systems’ defenses down and continue to use 17-year-old technology running on Windows XP operating systems?