The Thom Hartmann Program - Aug 30th 2018
By louisehartmann
It seems it's all racism, all the time w/the GOP...Neo-Nazi robocall hits Iowa on Molly Tibbett’s murder: “KILL THEM ALL. ” Richard Wolff drops by about the National Debt. Is it a disaster or an OK thing? Also - Trump & The National Enquirer - Is the Economy Here To Serve Us Or Are We Here to Serve the economy? Has America Become a "Grifter" Country? Check out our short podcast today https://www.thomhartmann.com/hartmann-report-podcast
Thom
Comments
#2
OpEdNews - 8/17/2017 - From AlterNet
"Why the GOP Sides With the Klan and the Nazis.
If you can't win on issues, you win on racism."
By Thom Hartmann:
Why is it that the president and the vast majority of Republican elected officials are refusing to refer to the white Christian neo-nazis who committed mayhem and murder and, yes, terrorism, as exactly what they are? Why the false equivalence suggesting that antifascists and peace protesters are the same as Nazis and Klan members?
As Holly Yan of CNN summarizes on their website, ISIS has a long history of using vehicles as weapons for terror attacks. London, Stockholm, Nice, Berlin, Jerusalem, and, in North America, St.-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec and Columbus, Ohio.
All these terrorists intentionally used cars or trucks to kill people and inflict maximum terror. All were condemned by Republicans and "conservative" media as "radical Islamic terrorism," and any number of Republicans, including Trump, milked them for all they were worth.
Yet on August 12, members of the oldest terrorist organization in the United States -- the Klan -- along with devotees of one of Europe's most terrible terrorist cults -- Nazis -- showed up in Charlottesville, Virginia, to reprise the Nazi and Klan traditions of torchlight night-time parades specifically to create terror. And when asked about it, Trump waffled.
He'll threaten North Korea with nukes, but won't even name the terrorists who showed up in Virginia.
And it's very, very hard to find an elected Republican (who isn't a presidential wannabe) who will call this what it is: White Christian Racial Terrorism.
Why?
The answer is really simple: If you can't win on issues, you go for what used to be called "wedge issues."
The Republican Party has basically one goal and one reason for existence right now: to protect and promote the interests of the rich and powerful, be they billionaires or the big corporations that spawn them.
But no Republican will run a TV ad saying, "If elected, I promise to destroy the social safety net and give the money to the billionaires; I promise to increase the levels of pollution and cancer-causing chemicals in our food, air, and water; I promise to block renewable energy and increase your utility bills; I promise to cut the taxes of the fat-cats and record-profitable corporations, while throwing you a bone of a few hundred bucks."
So what do they do? They create a "coalition." They do, after all, need voters to put them into power (although it's getting so tough for them that they have to rely on massive voter suppression among woke communities, and rigged voting machines and tabulators like were used against Governor Don Siegelman).
There are a number of American constituencies that really don't care how big a tax cuts the billionaires get, whether health care and education are savaged, or how badly our environment is poisoned, because they consider their own issues to be so Far More Important.
These include the anti-abortion/misogynists, the white supremacists, the anti-Semites, small-penis gun-nuts, and a very large group of white formerly middle-class people whose livelihoods have been wiped out by Reaganism and the so-called "free trade" policies that have been pushed by Republicans since Nixon.
Republicans need every vote. Even with Nixon committing treason in 1968 to win that election, he knew he still needed the votes of racist whites in the south -- thus his new "GOP Southern Strategy" (building on the old "state's rights" strategy in which, since Reconstruction, white politicians argued that the federal government had no business stopping southern states from literacy tests to vote to criminalizing sitting in a restaurant while black).
Reagan put it on steroids in 1980, when, as his first speech after getting the GOP nomination, he made the same pilgrimage Donald Trump Jr. more recently did to the Nebosha County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
(Reagan infamously said, there: "I believe in state's rights; ... we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.")
While this sort of racial dog-whistle politics is not new, at least prior to the election of Trump, in previous generations white supremacists wore hoods over their heads and didn't much go out in public with their hate.
As Lee Atwater, one of Reagan's main strategists and the father of the "Willie Horton" ads against Michael Dukakis in 1988, told a group of Republican activists in 1980, there was a new way to serve the rich while dog whistling to the rubes -- just use "abstract" language:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'n-word, n-word, n-word.' By 1968 you can't say 'n-word' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like 'forced busing,' 'states' rights' and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about 'cutting taxes,' and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the [Republican] racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the 'busing' thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'n-word, n-word.'"
This is how Republicans talked for decades when nobody outside the party was listening. "Cutting federal spending" was a wink-and-a-nod for "no more benefits to people of color" -- and still is today.
And the white racists who voted for Republicans post-1968 largely only showed their power at election time, and even then they didn't wear their robes or carry Nazi or Klan symbols to the polls.
But with the election of Trump (whose father was arrested at a 1927 Klan rally), all that changed. After he claimed that "all sides" were engaged in hatred, bigotry, and violence on Saturday, Nazis and Klan members openly celebrated.
We should have seen this coming: a year and a half ago, on CNN, Trump refused to rebuke David Duke and the Klan.
All to get elected. So he could cut the taxes of rich people and let big polluting business and banks have their deregulation. So he could cut his own taxes, for that matter.
You see, when you're running a scam and need a lot of rubes to win elections, you don't ever, ever, ever diss your rubes. This is why the GOP won't talk (other than a few who aspire to higher office) about white supremacy.
The vast majority of the billionaires behind the Republican Party don't give a rat's ass about civil rights or the Klan, one way or the other.
They don't care if working-class women can or can't get abortions/birth-control, or if Bubba can buy a gun even if he's certifiably insane (yes, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Trump did that).
They don't care if the air and water are poisoned: they have super-fancy air filters for their mansions and yachts, and their own water supplies.
They couldn't care less if Muslims are immigrating into the U.S.
And they certainly don't give a damn about a dead Confederate general.
But they do care if they have to pay the workers who make them rich a higher minimum wage. They do care if they're taxed to pay for the health care, education, or housing of poor and working people.
And they hugely care if they're to be held accountable for the way they're poisoning our world and paying people to lie to us about it.
So, with the support of a corrupt Supreme Court, they bought the Republican Party. And then got them all to sing the same tunes on the really important (to them) issues: climate change, deregulation/pollution, stealing federal lands, and cutting the top corporate and personal tax rates.
That the GOP would put America through all this racial and civil strife just to protect the interests of the few hundred billionaires and multi-millionaires who own them is mind-boggling.
That the Supreme Court would legalize it is obscene.
And that Trump would play racial politics in America in such a divisive and blatant way from the platform of the presidency proves he's unfit for office.
#3
FYI............
https://www.acf.hhs.gov/orr/resources
#4
#5
OpEdNews - 8/30/2017 - From Alternet
"The Media Is Creating a Left-Wing "Threat" to Balance Out the Awful Racist Right-Wing Hordes Who Threaten Civil Society.
We have to be vigilant about the coming smear project against Antifa."
By Thom Hartmann:
In these dark days, an intergenerational warning is in order: Antifa folks -- be wary. They are coming for you.
Some of us have seen this movie before. In my generation, when I was a teenage member of MSU's SDS in the late 1960s, I remember the guy who was always yelling, "Kill the pigs," and encouraging us to burn down the ROTC building on campus. In later years, I heard from old SDS colleagues that when they sued the police, they learned that the outspoken guy was a police officer and his friends were informants.
For my dad's generation, the right-wing takeover of a protest movement happened in Germany generations ago, so most Americans don't even recognize Marinus van der Lubbe's name.
But the Germans remember well that fateful day 81 years ago -- February 27, 1933. And many of them are looking at the confrontations in our streets and worrying.
It started when the government, struggling with questions of its own legitimacy and the instability of its leader, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. Historians are still debating whether the "terrorist" was a mentally incompetent young man maneuvered into place to take the fall for the crime, or was an actual communist ideologue (of limited intellectual means and probably schizophrenic; that seems to be one thing most agree on).
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the people claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted.
He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world.
His coarse use of language -- reflecting his background of hanging out with disreputable sorts -- and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media.
He desperately wanted to be appreciated and loved by the "old money" crowd, but he also hated them because they had never accepted him and, deep down inside, he knew they never would.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike, and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," Hitler proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out German Parliament building, surrounded by national media.
"This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion -- "a sign from God," he called it -- to declare an "all-out war on terrorism" and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.
And, he said, their fellow travelers -- "communists" like the man who'd set the Reichstag on fire -- needed to be tracked down and utterly destroyed.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianburg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation -- in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it -- that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus.
Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants and peek around without homeowners know it, if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a four-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Just like with America's recent PATRIOT Act, the first version of which had sunset provisions, legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader who was so newsworthy.
Citizens who protested the leader in public -- and there were many -- quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was constantly talking up the threat of these "other people" among the German people, while armed gangs terrorized minorities and smashed windows in Jewish-owned businesses.)
Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political adviser, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage.
He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his white countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will."
As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.
Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't put Germany First was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of the United Kingdom.
His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was supported by the power brokers of the most fervent of Germany's Christian sects. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" -- God Is With Us -- and most of them fervently believed it was true.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly the troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals."
He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the Homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader. He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the Homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.
His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at our disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public's recollection, as his central security office began advertising a "See Something, Say Something" program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors.
Those denounced often included opposition politicians and celebrities who dared speak out -- a favorite target of his regime. He began a campaign to discredit the press -- he called them the Lugenpresse, or "Lying Press" ("fake news" in today's vernacular). The phrase was repeated endlessly until all the free press was shut down in 1934. By 1935, all the radio stations and newspapers were owned by wealthy, hard-right friends of his regime.
To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the "leftist terrorists" lurking within the Homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas.
He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by liberals or Jews. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.
But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him (known as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, and away from questions of his illegitimate rise to power.
To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will.
In times of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself.
The majority -- the "silent majority" -- of good Germans hated the leftists, Hitler and his friends in the right-wing press repeatedly told the people.
Those questioning him were labeled "communists," "anti-German" or "not good Germans," and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the police and army came) against the "intellectuals and liberals" who were critical of his policies.
He spoke openly of his "love" for police and the military, and they, in turn, embraced him with fervor, redoubling the violence they wrought against peaceful protestors.
Hitler's rise to power was largely on the backs of the labor and communist movements. They were his "enemies" first and foremost (although anti-Semitism had been part of his shtick from the beginning: his main attack was that the labor and communist movements were filled with Jews). And he largely destroyed them when he successfully sold the German people on the idea that "the left" were responsible for burning down the Parliament building, the 9/11 event of that day.
There's little doubt in my mind -- having lived through the era of COINTELPRO and the PATRIOT Act -- that somewhere out there is a person who's planning to commit an act of terrorism. It may be a dedicated but deluded left-winger, or, more likely, it's a right-winger hoping to stir things up by pretending to be a left-winger. And Trump and his friendly "news" outlets are ready to use it.
Perhaps apocryphally, Mark Twain once noted that, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."
There's no shortage of examples of that rhyme, and given all the "mainstream" press now being thrown at the Antifa movement, it's a sure thing that they're going to be the Administration's and the media's next big boogeyman.
Somewhere out there is the next Marinus van der Lubbe, and Trump and his press are ready.
Look out.
#6
OpEdNews - 5/7/2017
"Republicans' Vicious and Immoral Health Care Bill Is Just Part of a Sinister Long Game.
By Thom Hartmann:
While Democrats are jubilant that the GOP passed a terrible healthcare/tax-cut bill through the House, which they think will cause voters to reject the GOP in 2018, it's a very, very premature celebration.
The Republicans are playing a longer game here, one based on a time-tested strategy first explicated by Machiavelli and fully put into place by Goebbels in the early 1930s, then fine-tuned by Reagan through the 1980s.
Sound like hyperbole (or a violation of Godwin's Law)? Check out this short clip of FDR's famous "Fala" speech in September of 1944:
Step two then becomes clear. The bill goes to the Senate and no matter what happens there, complain that it's being "watered down."
This sets up the perfect next part of the Goebbels/Machiavelli strategy -- claim victimhood, and place blame on those awful (and often racially different from all those white people at the White House ceremony) Democrats.
Because the Senate prevents some of the true horrors of the House GOP's plan from going into law, GOP voters don't realize (and Fox will never tell them) that it was really all just a hustle to satisfy the GOP billionaire donor class.
And, because of the Big Lie, every good thing that's still in Obamacare is thought, by Republican voters, to be the result of GOP efforts, as they now "own" health care. At the same time, they'll claim that Democratic obstruction is why whatever "bad" things happen happened. (And Drudge, et al, will be sure to find some horror stories in the fall of 2018.)
Step three happens in 2018 -- go after every Democrat running for the House or Senate for "obstructing Republican improvements and progress" on healthcare. It's another Big Lie, but, like Reagan's Big Lies about the evils of unions, the benefits of trickle-down economics, the urgency of exploding privatization of the military, not raising the SS retirement age, etc., it'll be believed by enough people to hold onto the House and Senate.
The proof that this strategy could work in this case is that it's already being used -- with success -- to obscure the true reason Republicans are trying so hard to "repeal and replace" Obamacare.
Here's what's really driving the GOP: The subsidies for middle class workers in Obamacare are largely funded by an almost 3 percent tax increase on capital gains income (and a small increase on the ordinary incomes of people in the top 1 percent).
This special 20 percent maximum capital gains tax rate is available only to people who "earn" their money with money/investments (rather than working and drawing a paycheck), and, thus, is almost exclusively paid at the full 20 percent rate only by the very, very, very rich. And that 3.8 percent top-end rate addition was a functional almost-15 percent tax increase on most billionaires.
They are not happy and they fund the GOP and its various corporate media propaganda arms.
But because the corporate media won't explain this ("it would seem partisan to point out facts inconvenient to Republicans," they whine), most Americans don't realize that the whole "health care debate" has little to do with health care -- it's really about cutting that 15 percent increased Obamacare tax on top-end capital gains income.
But because Republicans keep repeating the Big Lie that they're trying to get "more and better and cheaper" health care to Americans, most Americans don't realize it's really about a tax cut for the GOP donor class.
The success so far of this first half of the Big Lie technique should warn us loudly about the potential for GOP success with phase two, which begins now. Fox News is enthusiastically repeating the Republican lies from the Rose Garden Thursday, and right-wing hate radio is falling into line. Republican voters who live in the right-wing media bubble will absolutely believe these lies.
The only hope for Democrats to disrupt this process is to challenge the Big Lie and call it exactly that. The message needs to be simple ("It's a Big Lie -- it's really about cutting taxes on billionaires!"), repeated over and over again, and amplified by every media available, as most of the corporate TV media won't report on this in any honest way.
The entire agenda of the GOP has been, since the Reagan revolution (and, arguably, since the election of Harding, with the exception of Eisenhower), to exclusively serve the interests of the top 1 percent, while bringing along the rubes with "god, gays, and guns." And Democrats, while tacking toward the interest of the working class, need to point that out at every opportunity.
"Trumpcare -- The Big Lie" could be turned into the political equivalent of a bumper sticker and put everywhere. And the lies from the Rose Garden need to be challenged now, tomorrow, and every single day for the next 2 years by every elected Democrat in America by pointing out the reality of what's happening.
Otherwise, get ready for another 3 years of GOP rule.
That strategy is not only one the GOP has successfully used many times in the more recent past, from Nixon's "secret plan to end the Vietnam war" to Reagan's "reforms" of tax law, but one that they're clearly betting will continue to work for them (particularly with the help of Fox and right-wing hate radio).
Step one is to use the classic Goebbels "Big Lie" technique. That was on full display in the White House PR stunt after the House vote -- lie about lowering premiums, lie about expanding availability, lie about preexisting conditions, lie about how Obamacare is "failing." (Think Bush with Iraq, or the "Clear Skies Initiative," etc.)
And, to make sure it sticks, Trump had Republican after Republican step up to the microphone and explicitly and clearly repeat the Big Lies.
#7
OpEdNews - 9/16/2017 - From Thom Hartmann Website
"Berniecare finally arrives."
By Thom Hartmann:
Conservatives hate bureaucracy.
So when will they get behind Bernie Sanders' single-payer plan, which would do away with the paper-pushing waste in our healthcare system once and for all?
Berniecare is finally here.
On Wednesday afternoon Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders officially unveiled his plan for single payer healthcare, saying it was the start of a long fight to end the international shame that is our current healthcare system.
"Today, we begin the long and difficult struggle to end the international disgrace of the United States, our great nation, being the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all of our people. As proud Americans, our job is to lead the world on health care, not to be woefully behind every other major country."
Bernie's plan -- the so-called Medicare for All Act of 2017 -- would gradually phase every single American into the existing Medicare program over a four year period.
From that point onwards, healthcare would be free -- I repeat, free! -- for everyone.
The would be virtually no co-pays -- no premiums -- no deductibles -- no nothing.
Oh yeah -- and unlike Obamacare -- Berniecare would cover going to the dentist and the eye doctor.
It would also repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used to pay for abortions.
Isn't this real choice?
Single-payer gives people the ability to go to whatever doctor they want whenever they want without worrying about whether they'll go bankrupt.
Conservatives are all about repealing Obamacare.
So, let's do it and replace it with Medicare for all!
#8
DianeR,
One of the best books I ever read.....
Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
by Carroll Quigley (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Hope-History-World-Time/dp/094500110X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1541028231&sr=1-1&keywords=Tradgety+and+Hope
Check this out...2 minutes.
#9
#10
OpEdNews - 4/24/2017 - Reprinted from www.alternet.org with author permission
"The Bizarre Experience of Watching Cable News in America on Earth Day"
By Thom Hartmann:
Just exactly what the hell are they afraid of? Are the fossil fuel billionaires, corporations, and lobby really so strong that they can cow entire television networks and newspapers? Not to mention politicians?
All day Saturday, Earth Day I'd been on-and-off watching CNN and MSNBC while working on a new book. And I've heard repeated dozens of times that Trump and his buddies like Scott Pruitt don't want to "sacrifice jobs" on the altar of "climate regulations."
Never once has anybody pointed out that there's another side to the story.
It's simple, but I haven't heard it spoken out loud even once, from NPR to CBS: "There are huge profits to be made in poisoning us and our Earth, and the people profiting from that have and are funding politicians, 'think tanks' and PR firms, and television networks (via advertising), to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars over the decades. The people denying science are doing so because of the cash."
Why the hell won't anybody say that out loud?
ExxonMobil, we now know, has known about the damage their products were doing to our planet since at least the 1980s. Instead of changing their business plan, they began to directly and indirectly fund climate-change-denying groups in a big way. The Kochs aren't idiots, yet their network of corporate and billionaire funders is one of the main sources of money to politicians like Pruitt and, presumably, Trump (in the largest sense).
We are being poisoned for profits, and the scientists who are pointing this out are being shut down. And in the case of high-profile scientists like Michael Mann, even subject to extraordinary levels of harassment.
The waste materials from fossil fuel use and production are killing our planet and us. From cancers and asthma, to global warming, to driving wars around the world, these poisons are fouling our politics as well as our air, water, and food supply.
This is not a secret. Electronic and print media that don't take large amounts of money from fossil fuel interests have documented this in excruciating detail over the years (""Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial -- a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries' vast fossil fuel business," for example, by Frank Rich in The New York Times).
But our TV media, and our politicians, both beholden to the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it produces, won't even say it out loud.
When Trump says that he won't sacrifice jobs for the environment, this lazy media and the politicians it's willing to put on the air won't even point out the simple truth that a cleaner environment actually creates jobs.
Trump repealed the streams rule, so that coal companies can dump poisonous waste directly into our rivers and streams. He said he was doing it to "protect jobs." But that makes no sense: there's a lot more work/jobs involved in designing, building, and implementing systems to prevent or clean up fossil fuel poisons than there is in hiring a guy with a dump truck to throw waste into the river.
Doing away with President Obama's rules that moved in the direction of cleaning up coal-fired power plants won't "save jobs": to the contrary, the people who designed smokestack scrubbers (for example), the companies that manufactured them, the people who maintain and clean them, will all lose their jobs.
The only "new jobs" that will come from more poison in our air are in the medical field, as more cancers and lung diseases show up in our ERs. And if that's his pitch, why doesn't anybody in the media ask him to say it out loud?
Our TV and radio "press" are not delivering actual news when they ignore the takeover of our body politic by petro-billionaires or, even worse, continue to give air-time to science deniers.
And they're not serving the interest of us or our world when they fail to point out that Trump's and the GOP's anti-science policies are actually killing people -- and are only "helping" the "economy" of a few very, very rich fossil fuel empires.
#11
OpEdNews - 7/6/2017 - From Smirking Chimp
"Is America Past the Point of No Return?"
By Thom Hartmann:
Have corporate/billionaire control of our republic reached such a point that it's no longer reversible? Have we passed the tipping point where democracy dies?
A few years back, on my radio show, President Jimmy Carter said that America, in large part because of Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United, has become "just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery."
He's right. It's the elephant in the room that everybody, particularly our corporate media, completely ignores.
While Republicans are doing the will of their oligarch owners, replacing real scientists with industry lobbyists and shills everywhere from the White House to congressional science committees to the EPA, the media stubbornly refuses to report in depth on it, preferring instead to following the Worldwide Wrestling moves of our tweeter-in-chief.
"Red-shift" election fraud (called red because it helps only Republicans) has been flagrantly on display across the country since the privatization of our vote by GOP-leaning voter-machine companies in the 2000-2004 period.
GOP voter suppression in nearly 30 states has now been institutionalized with Kris Kobach's Interstate Crosscheck scam (now a presidential "commission"). Pre-poll and exit-poll results "flipped" in Georgia's 6th district in a way that caused us to decry similar vote-rigging in the Ukraine (the result, like in Georgia's 6th, was measurably off from the exit polls).
Yet in the face of all this, enough to provoke revolution in countries like Egypt and Ukraine, our press instead focuses on the oligarchs' unproven and well-debunked claim that "illegals" are voting to help Democrats.
While climate change is ravaging the world, the administration of billionaire oligarch Donald Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate change agreement and is rolling back climate-protecting rules on behalf other oligarchs in the oil, coal and gas business so they can continue to use our atmosphere as a sewer.
While billionaire-owned Republicans frantically work to roll back the 3.8% tax on investment income (for families with over $250,000 in investment income/year) their oligarch owners so despise, cutting millions of Americans off any hope of affordable healthcare access, the television media usually plays this tax-cut story as if it were about healthcare.
From trying to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which has returned to consumers billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains from our country's banksters), to gutting environmental laws, to preventing students from even declaring bankruptcy when their efforts to join the middle class by going to college don't work out, the oligarchs who now largely run America are solidifying their power and their wealth.
This is rule by the rich. It's here. It's now.
As Vice President Henry Wallace predicted in a prescient New York Times op-ed in 1944:
"They [the super-wealthy] claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.
"Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
Have they finally reached that goal which, in Wallace's day, they could only hunger for?
In 1944, the dream of the oligarchs to once again control America the way they did during the Gilded Age of the 1880-'90s was just that, a dream. Wallace's president, FDR, had called them out, repeatedly, calling them "economic royalists" and damning their efforts to corrupt American democracy.
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America," Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed in 1936. "What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."
But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"
FDR kept them in check, as did Truman and Eisenhower. The latter, a Republican president who ran for office on the 1952 platform of ending the Korean War ("Vote for peace, vote for Eisenhower" said the TV ads), even wrote to his right-wing brother, Edgar Eisenhower, about the very wealthy oil oligarchs who wanted to end the American experiment of a strong middle class:
"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. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
That was back when Eisenhower/Nixon ran for re-election in 1956 on a platform of having expanded Social Security, increased union membership, raised taxes on rich people, and built thousands of miles of freeway, hundreds of schools and hospitals, and radically increased funding for public education.
It all changed in the 1970s. As I outline in detail in my book The Crash of 2016, the modern oligarchic takeover of America began in a serious way in 1971 when Lewis Powell outlined in a memo how the very, very wealthy and corporate America should launch a massive, well-funded program to take over American media, take over our schools and colleges, take over our courts, take over our economy, and ultimately take over every branch of our government.
In 1976, Powell had his chance to put it all in motion in a big way. From 1776 until 1976, giving money to politicians in exchange for political favors had been considered a behavior (and often considered a corrupt behavior) that could be regulated by government.
But in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court decision, Powell, who had been put on the court by Richard Nixon in 1972, wrote that giving money to politicians wasn't a "behavior" subject to regulation, but, instead, was merely an "exercise in free speech." Free speech protected by the First Amendment.
This major rewrite of American law, sweeping in its breadth and reach, has echoed forward into our time with Citizens United and McCutcheon, among others. The result is that today right-wing billionaires not only own Fox and much of the rest of our media, but they are also largely determining the result of our elections.
In the 2016 election cycle, just the Koch network pledged over $800 million to elect billionaire-friendly Republicans. They succeeded, taking the House and the Senate, and with the efforts of their pliant shill Mitch McConnell, in blocking President Obama's middle-of-the-road SCOTUS nominee, Merrick Garland, from ever taking his rightful seat on the court. It's reported that they're planning to "invest" $400 billion, more or less, over the next 16 months.
Neil Gorsuch is more hostile to the interest of working-class Americans, minorities and traditional American egalitarian values than any member of the Court since the Lochner era. Billionaire-funded right-wing judicial groups like the Federalist Society are salivating at the chance to replace Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, cementing their control of the Court for as much as the next two generations.
This is the greatest crisis for democracy since Henry Wallace's era during World War II. Similar assaults against democracy are taking place all over the world, from Poland to Hungary to the Phillippines.
Will America see its way back to the expressed values of this country's founding? Having used those values as a guidepost, we've ended slavery, enfranchised women and created a social safety net that, at least until the era of Reagan, was still capable of offering life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to working American citizens.
Now, instead, we're seeing the values expressed by the dark underbelly of the American Revolution -- the oligarchs who owned plantations in the South -- ascendant.
Violent policing, more people in prison than any other country on earth, and the destruction of competition and entrepreneurial opportunity by monopoly are all the new normal. Corporate power is now being used not just to advocate for corporate interests, but to prop up faux populists like Trump and Scott Walker.
The effort, launched in the wake of the Brown v Board decision in 1954 (as so brilliantly documented by Nancy MacLean in her new book Democracy in Chains), to take over the institutions of American governance has been largely successful. And to solidify their gains, some among the very, very wealthy are aggressively supporting Republican efforts to gerrymander and vote-suppress the Democratic Party into oblivion.
In Crash, I pointed out how each of our nation's major reboots (each leading to a huge progressive leap forward) happened after an economic crisis. The economic crisis of 1772 (which led to the Tea Act, and then the American Revolution), the Great Crash of 1856-'57 (which even wiped out Abraham Lincoln and led to the Civil War), and what was then referred to as the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s (which led to World War II) all led to major changes in America.
Will it take another Great Crash to bring about a reformation of our government? Or have our oligarchs so deeply embedded themselves and their shills into our institutions of government that it's no longer possible for us to pull back from our headlong rush into neo-feudalism/neo-fascism?
The answer to both questions will probably become evident in the next three years.
But if America is to truly become the land of the free and the home of the brave, a place where any person can make it, a land clean and protected from corporate predation, it's going to take a massive mobilization of people who currently aren't even bothering to vote or run for office.
The Republican Party's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
In 1932, the pain from GOP policies was so great that Americans turned out in huge numbers for FDR. Disgust with the Republican embrace of America's robber barons was so thorough that, outside of 1947-'48, Republicans didn't hold majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1933 to 1995.
Today, even the phrases "robber barons" or "economic royalists" are likely to produce a "Huh?" response, particularly among those who watch oligarch billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Fox News or listen to right-wing hate radio.
Americans are in crisis. From opiates to student loan debt to underemployment, oligarchs representing monopolistic Big Pharma, Big Banks, and Big Retail/Fast Food are devastating us. Our courts are largely taken over by shills loyal to billionaire wealth and corporate power, as have the majority of our state governments. And our land and food supplies are poisoned daily by frakkers, polluters, and agricultural chemical companies.
And our ascendant political party, the GOP, is working as hard as it can to transfer trillions more dollars of wealth from working people to its patrons in the top 1%.
As Eldridge Cleaver said, "There is no more neutrality in the world. You either have to be part of the solution, or you're going to be part of the problem."
It's truer today than ever before. And it's not like we weren't warned.
#12
OpEdNews - 2/28/2017
"Here's Proof Republicans Are Done With Democracy"
By Thom Hartmann:
Show up for a protest, and end up losing your home, car, and retirement account? How about losing everything over just being at a meeting or on a conference call?
Confessed wife-beater and Arizona State Senator Sonny Borrelli (R-AZ) has introduced an amazing bit of legislation into the Arizona senate, which has already passed -- it's in the House now. The bill would hyper-criminalize any sort of organized political dissent if any person involved with that dissent (including, presumably, agent provocateurs) were to engage in even minor "violence," so long as that violence harms the "property," regardless of value, of any person (including a corporation).
They're doing this by expanding the Arizona RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) law to include conspiracy to "riot" among the offenses RICO can be used against. Not unlike parts of the Patriot Act being used against wannabe terrorists, the RICO laws are a powerful blunt instrument that have been used successfully to take down mobsters who have done a very good job of insulating themselves from their crimes.
Inspired in part by the take-down of Al Capone for tax fraud and mobster Rico "Little Caesar" Bandello, the 1970 federal law was one of the first to, in a really big way, make it possible for prosecutors to go after an entire "group" of people, rather than having to target criminals one at a time. As such, it relies heavily on previous laws that had defined "conspiracy" to be a felony.
And much like Richard Nixon used the nation's drug laws to break the backs of the anti-war and civil-rights movements, Senator Borrelli and his Republican friends apparently want to break the back of anti-GOP, anti-Trump protests with the same type of police-state overkill.
This is merely a new twist on an old Republican stragegy.
In 1999, John Ehrlichman, Nixon's former domestic policy chief, told Dan Baum in an interview with Baum about Nixon's war on drugs:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
The war on drugs was devastatingly successful, and continues to be: Nixon and his successors have locked up large parts of the African American community nationwide (leaving many unable to vote for the rest of their lives), and drug busts (often setups) were used with spectacular success at the local level against SDS and other anti-war activists in the 1960s and 1970s.
Now the power of another law (RICO) designed to deal with organized crime (and expanded in recent years to include "terrorism" and "animal activism") is about to be mobilized in a similar fashion against anybody who supports any anti-Republican demonstrations (that cause any "property damage") in Arizona.
As you can read in the proposed law, the realm of crimes into which RICO can now be applied has been expanded from "terrorism" (a recent addition) to "riot," which, itself has been redefined to include: "A person commits riot if, with two or more other persons acting together, such person recklessly uses force or violence or threatens to use force or violence, if such threat is accompanied by immediate power of execution, which EITHER disturbs the public peace OR RESULTS IN DAMAGE TO THE PROPERTY OF ANOTHER PERSON." (All-caps from the actual text of the proposed law.)
The new law also adds in the current Arizona "riot" law (13-2903) which essentially defines "riot" as the use of "force," and redefines "force" as anything that "disturbs the public peace." Using a bullhorn? Chanting? Singing? Or merely meeting and planning to do same ("threat" with the ability of "immediate power of execution" meaning you have the ability to stand outside and sing)? You're disturbing the public peace.
AZ 13-2903 reads: "A person commits riot if, with two or more other persons acting together, such person recklessly uses force or violence or threatens to use force or violence, if such threat is accompanied by immediate power of execution, which disturbs the public peace."
So, let's say the local chapter of #Indivisible or #OurRevolution or #BlackLivesMatter is planning ("threatening" under this law) to bring a group of people to the offices of Senator Borrelli or any of his GOP colleagues, or just to march through downtown Phoenix to protest ("disturb the public peace") Trump's bigoted policies after a particularly outrageous Executive Order.
And let's further imagine that somebody who wants to shut down that group has infiltrated it (be they from the police, the Klan, or the Black Block). The protest happens, and the infiltrator throws a stone and breaks a window. Or some people complain that their "peace" has been "disturbed," even if no rocks were thrown.
And you donated $25 to the group that organized the protest (but had no idea a violent infiltrator was going to show up). Or you went to a meeting of the group. Or you were on a conference call for protest planning. Or you were in the crowd on the day the stone was thrown or the "peace" was "disturbed."
Under the civil asset forfeiture laws, being used hand-in-glove with the new RICO law, everything you own can now be seized -- instantly, and before you're even convicted of anything. And once you've admitted you were a "co-conspirator" -- you donated, or showed up, or were on the call, or even a member of the chat-room -- you're now facing serious time in prison.
So, as is usually the case with RICO prosecutions, the prosecutors bring you in and offer you a deal: help us bust the leadership, and we'll let you go. So you end up being the stone-thrower at the next demonstration. Or you go to prison.
And, in the meantime, the local or state police department has already converted your home, car, and retirement accounts into cash and used them to buy a new tank for the police station.
And to the inevitable clueless-to-their-privilege white person who says, "Riot laws aren't controversial and they'd never use laws like this so broadly; that would be wrong," please talk with any person of color and ask how the "uncontroversial" drug, loitering, and, for G-d sake, even taillight laws have been enforced.
The families of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Samuel DeBose, and Sandra Bland (among thousands of others), and increasingly in Trumpworld, anybody who looks Hispanic or Muslim, or even has a Muslim-sounding name like the son of Muhammad Ali, can tell you something about selective enforcement of the law in America.
This is not what democracy looks like.
#13
#14
HotCoffee, I was aware of that non-lethal weapon. It has been around for quite awhile and I am surprised it is not deployed on a regular basis. I Would love to see it built into the wall as a permanent fixture.
You will find this interesting,
"Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh Turns Down $600,000 Raised in GoFundMe Campaign"
I find this to be very classy but expected. Kavanaugh will be on the bench for a very long time and he will have plenty of time to pee in the democrat party Wheaties hundreds of times over his long tenure. If the Republicans hold the Senate, look for Thomas to pull the plug and RBG to throw her hands up and say enough.
The manufactured democrat outrage over Kavanaugh seems like a very long time ago. They just jump form one crisis to another.
Whatever the outcome next week I wish the leftie/socialists a better outcome next week as I really don't think many of them can handle the stress of a major loss. It must be very sad to live their lives in a state of continual unhappiness and despair. What a depressing lot they have become.
Speaking of that, it looks like coalage3, you and I have forced the little resident pissant here to be tethered to his/her/alphabets computer 24/7, perhaps knitting little pink hats between cutting and pasting nothingburgers. Wow, what a life.
Another good day to you and yours.
Feed the birds.
#15
DianeR,
Trump also has 2 judges selected for the 9th circuit the Ca. dems are fighting, that would also make a big difference.
Wages are rising $15.00 per hour at Amazon....Walmart next?
It's so bad that they have Hillary thinking of running again and again and again. Sad!
She expends more energy sitting in a chair than Trump does having 3 rallies.
Meanwhile rumors abound that Muller connected to Whitey Bulgar death.
https://observernew.blogspot.com/2018/11/muellers-list-of-iniquities-con...
I'm starting to think this is the horses only social life....hope not!
Got to go to the feed store today...munchies getting short for the birds.
Another beautiful Day!! Enjoy.
#16
Among cable news networks FNC has bested its competition for 202 consecutive months in primetime total viewers, beating CNN, MSNBC and HLN combined; in total day, FNC outpaced CNN and MSNBC combined.
FNC’s primetime 2.829M viewers, ran a lap ahead of MSNBC’s 1.575M and CNN’s 931K. In the news demo, FNC’s 540K topped CNN’s 290K and MSNBC’s 281K.
FNC’s 1.685M total viewers in total day trounced MSNBC’s 909K and CNN’s 689K. In the key 25-54 year old age bracket, FNC’s 332K edged out CNN’s 201K and MSNBC’s 161K.
Part of the reason the ratings are so high is the midterms. Will these numbers translate to votes? We will soon know.
https://americanlookout.com/october-ratings-fox-news-beats-cnn-and-msnbc-combined/
#17
...cluck, cluck, cluck...
#18
3/15/18 - From AlterNet
"The Trump Administration Is a Government of Billionaires and Their Sycophants.
The GOP lackeys are eager to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money."
By Thom Hartmann:
A few years back, former President Jimmy Carter told me that, because of Citizens United and its predecessors (like the Buckley decision in 1976), we’re no longer a democracy, but instead, “an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery.”
For proof that Carter was right, one need look no further than Mike Pompeo taking Rex Tillerson’s job, stepping into Thomas Jefferson’s shoes as Secretary of State.
While Pompeo has an impressive resume on paper, something endlessly mentioned on cable news and other corporate media, the one skill-set that has truly enabled his rise to power, first in Congress and now in the Executive Branch, is his fine-tuned ability to suck up to #MorbidlyRich billionaires.
Prior to Trump arriving, Pompeo was one of Congress’s single largest beneficiaries of money from the Koch brothers and groups associated with them. Forget Pompeo’s army service and Harvard law degree; you don’t get to be the favorite son of the morbidly rich if you don’t know how to suck up to them.
Billionaire Trump, like so many others of America’s billionaire oligarchs, doesn’t take kindly to people who have their own minds. He wants fealty and sycophancy, not brilliance or competence.
For example, Rex Tillerson, actually looking at facts and political realities, made the mistake of pointing out to Trump that tearing up the Iran no-nukes deal at the same time you’re trying to negotiate a brand-new no-nukes deal with North Korea was contradictory messaging. What country, after all, would want to cut a deal with a partner who kills agreements unilaterally without contractual justification?
Tillerson, of course, was right. But he wasn’t sucking up to Trump in the way the oligarch wanted (and apparently, needed). Tillerson even occasionally put our nation’s security ahead of his subservience to Trump. Big mistake.
Many members of today’s billionaire class think of themselves as “self-made,” and so have a sneering disregard for the working people of America who “merely” aspire to the American Dream of being in the middle class with a safe job, good benefits, and a secure retirement. These oligarchs are more concerned with their profits than with the impact of their products or services on our country.
And they only want people around them who share their vision of their own greatness; who, in other words, are pathetic suck-ups. Pompeo has developed this to an art form.
After years of sucking at the Koch teat, Pompeo apparently realized that Trump, too, wanted only to surround himself with people who eagerly agreed with him. Probably Trump is even needier than the Kochs, and so would only elevate people who tell him daily how brilliant and strong and noble he is.
Thus, Pompeo apparently saw a career opportunity to ingratiate himself with another billionaire oligarch.
To make it happen, Pompeo changed the normal daily routine by which the president is briefed by the CIA. Instead of it being done with clear, cold precision by a career intelligence officer, henceforth, Pompeo decreed, the Director of the CIA himself (Pompeo) would take hours out of his day to make the daily trek to the White House to hang out with Trump and give him a pleasant daily tongue-bath.
Trump loved it.
Just like when he was a shill for the Kochs, Pompeo is more than willing to take any position—regardless of how badly it may hurt America or risk war or environmental destruction—that’s being pushed by his new billionaire overlord.
One imagines Pompeo as a loyal dog, constantly eager to please his master.
On its surface, this seems like an indictment of Pompeo himself, but it’s really not. It’s an indictment of the entire political system in the United States, as it has been re-invented by a “conservative” Supreme Court that created a brand-new legal structure around the notion that “corporations are persons” and using money to buy politicians is First Amendment-protected “free speech.”
No legislature or president had ever advocated those radical, anti-democratic positions, and neither had any American political party other than the Libertarians. The 1974 campaign finance reforms after the Nixon scandals, struck down by SCOTUS in 1976 with the Buckley case, were scrupulously bipartisan.
But Lewis Powell reached out to the oligarchs who often hired his legal services, and in 1971 his infamous “Powell Memo” charted how corporations and billionaires should take over virtually all the institutions of America, from Congress and the courts to our schools and local governments.
Later that year, Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he dutifully made the Buckley case happen in 1976, throwing open the door to corruption of our political system by American oligarchs. Citizens United, in 2010, took it even further, allowing foreign governments and non-U.S. oligarchs to take a simple step through a U.S. corporation (like, for example, the NRA) to, themselves, own American politicians.
In a breathtaking power seizure not authorized by the Constitution, the Supreme Court singlehandedly created an entire new body of law, and thus began the process of turning America from a representative democracy into an oligarchy.
And now, predictably, we have a billionaire oligarch as president, multiple billionaire oligarchs in his Cabinet, and the billionaire oligarch Kochs committing hundreds of millions of dollars to oligarch-friendly Republicans in every election cycle.
In an oligarchic nation, there is one singular skill for political success: one must willingly, ably, and enthusiastically suck up to the rich and powerful, subordinating one’s ethics, reason, and even humanity.
This is a tragedy for both the USA and for democracies all over the world that emulate us.
Oligarchy (and its companion, strong-man pseudo-populism) is spreading rapidly, subsuming former liberal democracies like Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary while nibbling away at other democratic countries. China is holding oligarchy up as the new model for the world.
We must reverse these disastrous Supreme Court decisions with a Constitutional Amendment, explicitly stating that corporations are not people and that money is not speech; otherwise, our rapid march to total oligarchy will continue to gather speed and power.
And suck-up politicians like Pompeo will continue to rise to the top, eager and willing to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money, prestige and power.
ttps://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-administration-syncophant-billionaires
#19
OpEdNews - 3/12/2017
"Right-Wing Billionaires Have a Project to Rewrite Our Constitution, and They Are Shockingly Close to Pulling It Off.
A few years ago, it would have been a thought experiment; now it's nearly reality."
By Thom Hartmann:
Imagine if the U.S. Constitution barred the EPA and Department of Education from existing. All union protections are dead, there are no more federal workplace safety standards, and even child-labor laws are struck down, along with a national minimum wage.
Imagine that the Constitution makes it illegal for the federal government to protect you from big polluters, big banks and even big food and pharma -- all are free to rip you off or poison you all they want, and your only remedy is in state courts and legislatures, because the Constitution prevents Congress from doing anything about any of it. The federal government can't even enforce voting or civil rights laws.
To add injury to insult, the federal government has to shut down Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because all of these programs (along with food stamps, housing supports and any programs that help the middle class, the less fortunate or disabled) are "beyond the reach" of what the federal government can do.
A few years ago, it would have been a thought experiment; now it's nearly reality. Billionaires and the groups they fund are working to rewrite our Constitution to provide corporations and the rich with more and more protections and benefits, and chop away at anything smelling of "socialism" like Social Security or child labor laws.
The fact is that they're just a few states away from meeting their goal, and have already held dress rehearsals in Washington D.C. -- with representatives from all 50 states -- for a Constitutional Convention that would change America forever.
The Constitution (arguably) provides for three ways to change or amend itself. The first is that Congress can propose a constitutional amendment, pass it with a super-majority in both houses, and have three-quarters of the states ratify it. This is the way it's been done for every one of the existing 27 amendments.
The second strategy is done by using Article 5 of the Constitution and driving the process up from the states. The easiest way to do this is for three-quarters of the states to legislatively approve (with majority votes in each state) an amendment, in which case Congress is unnecessary and upon ratification by the 38th state, it becomes a permanent amendment to the Constitution.
While this strategy has never been used, it's why many of the good government groups like Move To Amend and Public Citizen are pushing for a "Corporations are not people, and money is not speech" amendment.
The third -- and incredibly dangerous -- strategy to amend the Constitution is to simply call a "Convention of the States," again using Article 5, and open the entire document itself up to rewriting and tinkering through the brute-force method of multiple amendments that can effectively rewrite any part of the Constitution.
This third strategy is the one being used right now, as you're reading these words, in a very well-funded effort by right-wing oligarchs. If they can pull it off in the states (where it's cheaper to buy politicians), then Congress, the president and even the courts would have no say over it.
Their goal appears to be to put into the Constitution specific prohibitions against any programs (from Social Security to Medicare to food stamps) that they've always viewed as "unconstitutional socialism," and to permanently enshrine in the Constitution the "right" of corporations and billionaires to own politicians and spend unlimited monies to influence elections and ballot measures. It would effectively turn America into a feudal state owned by the people FDR called the "economic royalists."
The group leading this charge is called Citizens for Self-Governance, which SourceWatch.org says, "is a right-wing political organization tied to Eric O'Keefe that is campaigning for an Article V convention to amend the U.S. Constitution. 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)."
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 requirement."
And they're actually doing it. 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 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.
"As of 2016, CSG's application for a Convention of States has been passed in eight states: Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Alaska, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Louisiana."
Now that they have mobilized thousands of enthusiastic billionaire-supporting conservatives across the nation, with help from one of America's most widely heard right-wing talk-radio hosts, 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, limiting the Commerce Clause to its original meaning [ending minimum wage, federal right-to-unionize, and child-labor laws], limiting the power of federal regulations [aka ...consumer protections], requiring a super-majority to impose federal taxes and repealing the 16th Amendment [which legalized federal income taxes], and giving the states the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation, or executive order."
We've discussed this movie before, although we've never seen it so close to us.
On April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against fascist Germany and Japan, the New York Times published an op-ed by Vice President Henry Wallace discussing explicitly the issue of very wealthy people setting out to take over our government.
Wallace spoke directly to the danger of multimillionaire and corporate power, defining right-wing industrialists as people "who in case of conflict put money and power ahead of human beings." He added that "in their search for money and power [they] are ruthless and deceitful. ... They... follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
In his strongest indictment of that day's equivalent of today's billionaire class, Wallace wrote, "They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
As Wallace's president, Franklin D. Roosevelt said when accepting his party's re-nomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction."
We stand at the same crossroads Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II, only this time the Supreme Court (in 1976 with Buckley, 1978 in Bellotti and in 2010 with Citizens United) has given American billionaires the power to spend virtually unlimited amounts of money to own politicians and demand behavior from them so outrageous that they'd even lie on live TV and deny science itself.
The billionaire right's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. It's critical that we call out these economic royalists for what they're doing, and not let them and their minions rewrite our Constitution.
#20
#21
again...
10/29/18 - Independent Media Institute / Alternet
"We Can't Deny the Connections Between the Pittsburgh Shooting Suspect's Apparent Motivation and Trump's Bigotry.
We can’t let them conceal the motive for the killings, which lead back to Trump."
By Thom Hartmann:
t’s already started. They’re messaging, texting, tweeting, and even calling into my radio/TV show. Breitbart is even bragging that they got it on CNN.
“This killing in Pittsburgh has nothing to do with Donald Trump. He’s not an anti-Semite; his daughter converted to Judaism and his grandkids are Jews! How can you blame him for the ‘mentally ill’ guy [a phrase used to describe terrorists only when they’re white]?”
But the shooter, by his own words—words that are almost entirely missing from most TV coverage—acted because of what both Trump and Newt Gingrich have said was the main election-year message of Trump and the entire Republican Party: Immigration by people of color.
As the terrorist himself posted on social media just a few hours before he walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh with an AR-15, he was going to kill members of a congregation that supported the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).
HIAS (whose slogan is “Welcome the stranger; Protect the refugee”) had designated October 19 and 20 of this year as the “National Refugee Shabbat”—and when they did so, the terrorist posted on a right-wing social media site, “Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided.”
HIAS was founded in New York in 1881 to help resettle Jewish refugees, but in recent years has moved many of its efforts toward other refugees, including people from Africa, the Americas, and people who practice Islam. As HIAS’s president, Mark Hetfield, told the New York Times, “We used to welcome refugees because they were Jewish. Today HIAS welcomes refugees because we are Jewish.”
Dark skin and “Muslim” are triggers for bigots like the cowardly terrorist and his buddies on social media. In another post, presumably referencing HIAS, he wrote, “Open you [sic] Eyes! It’s the filthy evil jews [sic] Bringing the Filthy evil Muslims into the Country!!”
HIAS used to have a link on its website to the 270 congregations in 32 states that were participating in the work to bring refugees into the United States (and elsewhere), although that link now just points back to their homepage (perhaps because the event is over, or maybe because of the terrorist’s threat).
Noting the terrorist’s pointing out that link to the congregations, which includedTree of Life in Pittsburgh, the Times of Israel reported, “To mark the organization’s personal involvement, at the back of the hall, information on volunteer opportunities in the refugee and immigration committees of participating synagogues and HIAS materials were available for attendees to take home, including a bookmark with the words ‘My People Were Refugees Too.’”
Apparently this festered with the terrorist, because just a few hours before he walked past those brochures and started murdering people at Tree of Life, he posted to a right-wing social media site, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
And in he went, guns blazing.
So, Trump and Gingrich and Fox are giving all-day, all-the-time coverage to a ragtag band of Central American refugees, mostly women and children, who are traveling together on foot for their own mutual safety, lying that there are Arab terrorists and evil gang members among them. This white American terrorist gets increasingly agitated by it all, freaked out that more people of color (or even Muslims!) might be coming to our border to legally apply to asylum, and decides it’s time to take out one of the groups associated with HIAS, who is helping refugees.
It’s a straight line—through Fox and right-wing hate radio—from Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants to the terrorist himself.
Certainly this terrorist had a history of hating Jews; he had repeatedly posted on one of his snowflake “safe places” for haters, “Kill all the Jews!” and “There is no MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.”
But this wasn't entirely an anti-Semitic attack, by the attacker’s own words.
A few days after another white terrorist (“history of mental illness,” said the media) with Trump and Fox graphics and slogans all over his van attempted the largest political assassination in U.S. history, we now have the single most lethal attack on Jews in this country’s history—in part because their synagogue supported helping immigrants coming into America.
And all of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump.
This aspect of xenophobic immigrant-hating, along with the insanity of the U.S. allowing AR-15s and other weapons of war on our streets, must be discussed along with the horrors of anti-Semitism.
This is all one package brought to us by Trump, and it’s beginning to eerily resemble a previous insecure man with little hands, a single testicle, and a big mouth in the 1930s who warned his people about both immigrants and Jews.
We all know how well that turned out for Germany and the world.
#22
Trump is not responsible for the Pittsburgh shooting or the alleged bombing plot. That would mean that crazy Bernie Sanders is responsible for the softball practice shooting. And Obama is responsible for the Dallas police shootings.
#23
#24
...back to class, trolls... (1 of 2)
(5/29,/18 - Independent Media Institute / Alternet
"9 Ways Authoritarianism Is Taking Hold Under Trump
-- The president and his neo-authoritarian acolytes are following an ancient playbook."
By Thom Hartmann:
As our country slides into an ugly Americanized form of neofascism, there’s good news: nonviolent protest, when in the service of progressive, egalitarian goals, almost always wins out when it reaches a national critical mass. And we may well be on the verge of that right now. But we must understand what we’re up against.
Donald Trump and his neo-authoritarian acolytes are following an ancient playbook.
Part Machiavelli, part Caesar, part Mugabe/Duterte/Mao, it always includes a few simple and primary elements of seizing and subverting normal political power.
Here's how the president is building authoritarian institutions.
1. Lie Often — Lie Big.
As President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out, the Big Lie technique wasn't invented by Hitler but was essential to his success, and in the 1944 election, the Republican Party began to turn it on Democrats.
FDR wasn't having any of it.
“The opposition, in this year, has already imported into this campaign a very interesting thing, because it’s foreign,” FDR told the nation during that year’s presidential campaign.
“They’ve imported the propaganda technique invented by the dictators abroad,” FDR said. “Remember a number of years ago there was a book, Mein Kampf, written by Hitler himself. The technique was all set out in Hitler’s book and was copied by the aggressors of Italy and Japan.
“According to that technique, you should never use a small falsehood. Always a big one. For its very fantastic nature would make it more credible. If only you keep repeating it over, and over, and over again.”
As George Lakoff pointed out in his brilliantly titled book Don’t Think of an Elephant,in order for us to process a lie—even knowing it’s a lie—we must first imagine it as a truth, a reality. (I also wrote at length about this in my book on using neuro-linguistic programming [NLP] in politics, Cracking the Code.)
If you hear, “Don’t run into the street,” you must first imagine running into the street to know what “don’t run into the street” means. You have to clearly visualize it.
If you hear “FBI spies were in my campaign,” you must first clearly imagine FBI spies in the Trump campaign, before you can process the fact that every intelligence agency and even the administration itself say that there were no spies (unless they were foreign) within the Trump campaign.
That simple act of creating the visualization that is then knocked down by the correction of the lie, instead embeds itself into consciousness as a temporary pseudo-reality and, for people inclined to believe, the actual belief of reality, of the asserted lie. From there, the lie makes its way to the conscious mind as a belief or “fact.”
Whether the lie is about a particular religion or race being “vermin” or “animals,” and whether it’s said in 1934 or 2018, doesn't much matter: once the mental picture is formed, reality begins to waver for even the most well-informed among us.
And trying to rebut the lie only strengths it, because the rebuttal presupposes the possibility that the lie could be true. Every time a Trump or GOP lie is rebutted, it’s also repeated: The rebuttal actually strengthens, in the minds of the already-converted, the reality of the lie, and makes it easier for the uncertain to begin to believe it.
This is why fully 48 percent of Republicans believe that over 3 million undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 election, and similar or higher percentages of Republicans believe climate change is a hoax, the GOP tax cuts “for the middle class” were real, and that deregulating environmental and workplace protections will lead to higher wages and more jobs.
All lies; all repeated over and over again; all believed.
2. Consolidate Power While Challenging or Co-Opting Institutions That Enforce Accountability.
Every authoritarian leader who’s come to power in history, from Samaria 7,000 years ago to today’s administration from the White House at the top, to the EPA under Scott Pruitt, makes this their second big move. Weaken the institutions of accountability, while intimidating your own allies into submissive servility.
That judge was a Mexican. The investigation into Trump is a witch hunt. Congress doesn't have the authority to investigate Republicans.
People in Trump’s own party, like Corker, McCain, and Flake, who are willing to challenge the president, got politically destroyed, so others became afraid to challenge him. Meanwhile, those American politicians and foreign powers that suck up to him and his relatives in the Trump Crime Family are richly rewarded.
This behavior is a calling card of tin-pot dictators, but it’s also the key to the power held by most national-scale modern authoritarian regimes. And once the allies of Dear Leader begin to bow to the authoritarian on bended knee, the process can take on a momentum that makes it unstoppable until it’s totally and irrevocably defeated by an external power (think Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan in World War II).
Packing the courts is the final step in this process, as we’ve seen in every country in history where democracy has died. Senate Majority Leader Republican Mitch McConnell set this process up by denying President Obama his constitutionally provided-for court appointments, ranging from the most routine to the Supreme Court itself. Now the GOP court-packing operation, even to the point of defying centuries-old Senate traditions like blue-slipping, has moved into hyper-gear.
Even “prison reform” efforts have been co-opted to include “mens rea” (“state of mind”) changes in the law that will insulate CEOs and billionaire corporate owners from decisions they make that lead to death or environmental destruction if the prosecution can’t prove that such an outcome was not only predictable, but was their specific intent. It will end corporate perp walks for all but the lowest-level flunkies, and is tied to virtually every Republican or bipartisan “sentencing reform” effort.
And to the extent that the electorate may hold these new authoritarians in check by voting them out of office, wide swaths of the American electorate are being purged from voting rolls with Kansas’s Kris Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program, or blocked from voting for lack of the “Republican-certified ID” like a state-issued concealed carry permit (students with government-issued student ID need not apply to vote).
If they successfully navigate all these barriers, voters (particularly minority voters, or voters in Democratic-heavy districts) still find that their voting machines, like the ones in Detroit in 2016 that failed to record over 75,000 votes for president(Trump won Michigan by fewer than 11,000 votes), are “defective.” If they do work at all, they’re put out in such small numbers that working people must wait in lines for 6 to 12 hours.
The speed with which these deeply anti-democratic changes are happening in America today is, to most historians, extremely alarming.
3. Attack the Press.
British conservative (and advocate of the American Revolution) Edmund Burke coined the phrase “the fourth estate” in 1787 to describe the press when arguing that Parliament should open itself up to newspaper reporters. Along with the legislative, executive, and judicial “estates” of governance, every functional republic since that era has included strong protections of the press as a pseudo fourth branch of governance, an explicit and public check on the abuse of power.
But to an autocrat whose wealth, power, and longevity in office depend on the abuse of power, a free and independent press is a danger. This is why Hitler shut down the independent press in 1933-’34, although he kept the appearance of press diversity by allowing many of the formerly independent newspapers to be acquired by media companies his cronies owned.
Historically, the two strategies emerging autocracies use in this regard are to:
1.) Attack the credibility and right to existence of the independent media while,
2.) Consolidating and expanding the reach and power of friendly media, typically owned by cronies of the autocrat.
Between cries of “fake news” and “pull their credentials” directed at “legacy media”; a push for corporate concentration of that media that started when the Reagan administration ended the Fairness Doctrine and corporatized NPR; and the elevation of billionaire-owned/affiliated media outlets like Fox, Sinclair, and the large terrestrial radio networks that pretty much exclusively carry right-wing talk radio, this process is already far down the road in the United States.
4. Vilify Protesters, Minorities, and Political “Enemies” to the Point of Provoking Violence.
This administration and the GOP they’ve captured have become the party “of dreadful fear and hate” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against. We see it in institutionalized police violence against African Americans and immigrants; excessive arrests and punishments of people protesting Trump’s inauguration and speeches; new laws punishing journalists for reporting on factory farm and corporate environmental abuses; and violence-tinged rhetoric against “Mexican rapists,” using MS-13 as a rhetorical proxy for Hispanics, and saying Black NFL players hate/disrespect our flag and country, among other things.
And by accusing the other side of what they, themselves are doing, these new authoritarians deflect attention from their own very intentional strategy. Just google the words “Trump attacks liberals” without the quotation marks to see page after page of over-the-top snowflake-like examples of conservative media and politicians complaining that liberals are “unfairly attacking” Trump and the GOP.
5. Scapegoat Minority Groups to Rile Up a Mob Mentality.
Sadly, one of the psychological legacies we share with other predatory mammals is the ability to instinctually form “packs” and drop into pack-like behavior, particularly against those who are weak or wounded. Although we have an intellect that should protect us from such behavior, the instincts wired into our DNA will always beat our thought processes, at least over the short term.
Fascists and authoritarians use this core mammalian instinct, paraphrasing Sinclair Lewis, to “rouse up the rubes.”
While this was a common feature of American politics in the century following the Declaration of Independence when it was directed by white politicians and police authorities against Native Americans and slaves, and popped up in the 1880s against Chinese immigrants, the modern Trump Party has resurrected it to use against immigrant children, women, religious and racial minorities, and the LGBTQ community.
Not to mention provoking violence against “libtards” like Heather Heyer, whom Trump’s “very fine people” murdered last year in Charlottesville, Virginia. (I don’t want to include links in this article to neo-Nazi sites, but just google “libtard heather heyer” without the quotes; you’ll be shocked.)
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/9-ways-trumps-authoritarianism-taking-hold
cont'd...
#25
cont'd (2 of 2)...
5/29,/18 - Independent Media Institute / Alternet
"9 Ways Authoritarianism Is Taking Hold Under Trump
-- The president and his neo-authoritarian acolytes are following an ancient playbook."
By Thom Hartmann:
6. Elevate One Religion That You Can Control (and Reward) While Trashing Others.
After World War II, one of the most interesting and conspicuous of the suicides in Germany was that of the Reich’s Bishop, Ludwig Müller. Elevated to the head of the German evangelical movement by Hitler himself, Müller became the most wealthy and powerful member of Germany’s clergy during the Reich. At first skeptical of the Fuhrer, he later told his colleagues that the “great goods” that Hitler would bring the church far outweighed his failings as either a person or a leader.
Müller was neither the first nor the last religious leader to both exploit and be exploited by an authoritarian regime.
Authoritarian leaders almost always use members of minority religions as scapegoats. What’s less well realized is that they almost always (the one modern exception was communism) favor one particular religious group, and use the wealth and power of the state to shower favors on that group so long as that group helps keep them in power.
Along those lines, in 1988 the campaign of George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis brought onboard an outspoken fundamentalist evangelical Christian to lead their “religious outreach” efforts. Ex-alcoholic, saved-by-Jesus credentialed “black sheep of the family” George W. Bush worked hard through that campaign to bring religious leaders who were skeptical of the religious enthusiasm of George Senior into that 1988 campaign.
Bush Jr.’s efforts were largely successful and were repeated and amped up during his own presidency, as Jerry Falwell and his ilk became regular fixtures in the White House. In bright contrast to Republicans from Warren Harding to Dwight Eisenhower, that established the foundation for a clear quid pro quo relationship between white evangelical leaders and Republicans.
Now the religious right wants their payback.
Taking a cue from ALEC—that right-wing, billionaire-funded group that brings together state lawmakers and lobbyists to write “model” legislation on behalf of corporate interests in exchange for their funding GOP politicians—the new group is called Project Blitz. They’re working explicitly and publicly to change the legal landscape of America with regard to religion.
As Katherine Stewart wrote for the New York Times, “The idea behind Project Blitz is to overwhelm state legislatures with bills based on centrally manufactured legislation.” She quotes “Christian nationalist” David Barton as saying, “It’s kind of like whack-a-mole for the other side; it’ll drive ’em crazy that they’ll have to divide their resources out in opposing this.”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State has, so far, identified more than 70 pieces of state legislation derived from Project Blitz, with more to come. In Oklahoma, Stewart writes, it’s a bill that allows discrimination in adoptions; in Minnesota, it’s legislation unconstitutionally letting publicly paid-for schools to post “In God We Trust” in their classrooms.
Contrary to Barton’s revisionist history, this was not how the Founders saw things.
In the summer of 1786, Thomas Jefferson was the U.S. government’s official envoy, essentially an ambassador, to France. While there, he was horrified by the way the Catholic Church dictated terms to both people and government.
On August 13th, he wrote a long letter to his old friend, teacher, and mentor George Wythe, then a judge in Virginia. Jefferson started out by commenting on how his (he first demanded it, then wrote parts of it) First Amendment to the Constitution had been well received by the Parisian intelligentsia:
“Our act for freedom of religion is extremely applauded. The ambassadors and ministers of the several nations of Europe, resident at this Court, have asked of me copies of it, to send to their sovereigns, and it is inserted at full length in several books now in the press; among others, in the new Encyclopedie. I think it will produce considerable good even in these countries, where ignorance, superstition, poverty, and oppression of body and mind, in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped. …
“If anybody thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the public happiness, send him here. It is the best school in the universe to cure him of that folly. He will see here, with his own eyes, that these descriptions of men are an abandoned confederacy against the happiness of the mass of the people.”
Noting that the people of France had been “loaded with misery” by “nobles and priests, and by them alone,” Jefferson ended his letter with a call for Wythe to join him in his crusade against religion burrowing into the newly formed government of the United States by using the power of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution to build a free public school system:
“Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know, that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose, is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. But it needs but half an eye to see, when among them, that the foundation is laid in their dispositions for the establishment of a despotism.”
The religious right has made a metaphorical “deal with the devil” in Trump and the GOP that would have horrified the Founders of this nation, but is found in the storyline of nearly every authoritarian government in history. And now these so-called “Christians” want to leverage that power into ever-greater control over our minds and ever-greater access to our bank accounts.
7. Co-opt and Make Institutions of Military and Police Power into Loyal Sycophants.
Without the police and the military on their side, a tyrant’s days in office are inevitably numbered.
That’s why one of the hallmark behaviors of authoritarian leadership and its media supporters is to praise and empower, to the point of fetishizing, the police and the military. They then amplify this with elaborate displays of symbolic patriotism like singing the national song and hyper-displaying the flag.
From attacking NFL players for protesting police violence against unarmed Black people to telling a crowd of police officers to not be professional or respectfulwhen arresting people, to chest-thumping about our military as “the most powerful ever,” Trump doesn't even try to be subtle about his threats. The next step, if he follows the well-worn authoritarian path, is to put on Saddam Hussein-style military parades.
Meanwhile, the process that Ronald Reagan began, and Newt Gingrich sped up with his 1033 program, of redirecting billions of dollars of military funds, hardware and training to police departments, begins the process of turning ordinary police agencies into praetorian guards to solidify the power of the now-captured state.
Exempting police unions from crackdowns on other government employee union activities, like Scott Walker did in Wisconsin, hastens the process by ensuring the loyalty of the one legally armed, duty-sworn agency of government.
8. Ignore Competence and Incompetence; Only Loyalty Matters—and Is Richly Rewarded.
Mainstream Republicans on TV seem baffled as to why Trump would want clearly incompetent people like Ben Carson, Betsy DeVos, and Wilbur Ross in Cabinet positions where they run major governmental agencies.
Similarly, average Americans can’t figure out why Ryan Zinke (Interior) is intent on selling off our national parks to mining and drilling companies; why Scott Pruitt (EPA) is hell-bent on destroying the quality of our air and water; and why Mick Mulvaney (OMB and CFPB) wants to hand banking and general corporate regulation over to the lobbyists for the banks and payday lenders.
While some of this, particularly the last three mentioned, is really all about shifting power in America away from government protections of consumers/workers and toward giving such power to the billionaire/corporate class, the key to the whole thing is loyalty.
When Trump introduced a raised-arm loyalty oath at his campaign rallies in 2016, even Glenn Beck said on ABC, “We all look at Adolf Hitler in 1940. We should look at Adolf Hitler in 1929. Donald Trump is a dangerous man with the things that he has been saying.”
Trump’s obsessive need for loyalty—the result of a lifetime of insecurity and unethical/illegal business practices—are spreading through government institutions like the EPA and DOD the way a fungus spreads through a bag of apples on a warm day. The autocrat-in-chief is being, daily, imitated by his appointed minions, to the point that there are constant leaks about the “kiss-up-kick-down” psychopathological behavior of everybody from the White House doctor to Ryan Zinke and the flag he requires be raised over the roof of his building when he’s in his office.
In the process, the public good has been forgotten—or pushed aside as Trump and his fellow hogs monopolize the trough.
Another dimension of this is, while punishing your enemies, to support your friends. Trump and his administration have showered literally trillions of taxpayer dollars on their billionaire and corporate friends, from the GOP tax scam to their widespread destruction of protective regulations, to selling off public lands for pennies on the dollar.
Looting the public trust—and rewarding your friends with the money—was well documented by Fritz Thyssen’s chilling book I Paid Hitler. It’s a visible and important key to success for autocrats from Turkey to Russia to China. And Trump has brought it to the White House in a big way.
9. Foster a Sense of Helplessness Among the Opposition.
Whether it’s done with selective and brutal enforcement of the law, subtly shutting down access to the media, or outright infiltration, destroying the opposition is a critical key to seizing and holding authoritarian power in any nation.
When I was a teenager, Richard Nixon was behind efforts to shut down the anti-war and Civil Rights movements. His attacks on Martin Luther King Jr. are well known, and I still clearly remember the guy who always showed up at Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) meetings yelling that it was time to “kill the pigs” and “burn down the ROTC building!” We later learned he was a police informant, although most of us suspected it at the time.
But the infiltration word of its effectiveness—along with the murder of JFK, MLK, RFK, and members of nonviolent dissident groups like the Panthers—did its dirty work.
Numerous people, at first enthused by the nonviolence and human rights advocated by Students for a Democratic Society and the ’60s Civil Rights movements, drifted away from political activism and, in the 1970s and ’80s, fell into sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and religious cults. And, as Reaganomics began to strip the middle class of the economic independence they enjoyed pre-Reagan, people bonded more and more to the corporate world and left politics behind.
Today, with government agencies able to turn a cell phone into a remote spy device, even people planning simple protests (from the RNC in 2004 to inaugural protests in 2017) often find themselves in jail cells or court before they take any direct actions whatsoever. Trump’s regime ramped up the charges against the 2017 inaugural protesters to the point where hundreds were facing over a decade in federal prison, further terrorizing any potential future protesters.
Fear, and a sense of powerlessness or resignation, are two of an authoritarian regime’s most powerful weapons.
Defeating Neofascism, Neo-Authoritarianism, and Corporate/Billionaire Corruption
The good news is found in recent research on the ways that societies come back from, or restore democracy to, authoritarian and/or highly corrupt governments. While surprising, it’s not counterintuitive.
Maria J. Stephan, director of educational initiatives at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, and Erica Chenoweth, assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, published a mind-boggling paper almost a decade ago titled “Why Civil Resistance Works.”
In the first (!) comprehensive look in 200 years at how people take back their governments, they found that nonviolent resistance was nearly twice as successful (53 percent to 26 percent) as violent opposition at restoring democracy to, or exacting consequential political concessions from governments that had flipped authoritarian. (Chenoweth lays it out in a fascinating TEDx talk, as well.)
In just six years, for example, they showed non-violent-led civil reform movements having major successes around the world: “Serbia (2000), Madagascar (2002), Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004-05), Lebanon (2005), and Nepal (2006).”
Looking all the way back to 1900, they demonstrated that that two-to-one ratio of the success of nonviolent versus violent movements held.
Even revolutionary violence and terrorism as methods to produce political and social change (the methods we used to liberate the U.S. from Britain in 1776, and the Confederacy tried without success in 1861) are only effective 7 percent of the time, they found—a fraction of the 53 percent success rate demonstrated by historic nonviolent movements like those led by King and Gandhi.
Of course, these things can rub both ways. When our nation elected our first Black president, the Koch billionaire network and friends funded the Tea Party to "create a movement" out in the streets and in front of the cameras. That nonviolent movement, once activated, was sufficient to change control of an entire political party, the GOP.
Similarly, it seems that the progressive movement to return the Democratic Party to its FDR roots, which kicked off in a big way with the 2015 Bernie Sanders candidacy, has already succeeded in producing a deep and lasting refutation of the “Third Way” corporatist political alignments that had controlled the Democratic Party since 1992. The job isn't yet finished, but it’s moving at a lightning pace.
And, most encouraging, it was done without being funded and directed by a small group of cranky billionaires. It represents a true people’s movement, which means its power to produce deep and lasting change is massively greater than a few rich people buying politicians and owning media.
If Chenoweth and Stephan et al’s research is correct, this relatively small tail can wag the proverbial dog of national politics in hugely consequential ways.
At a time when several American billionaires are funding openly racist media vehicles and explicitly using them to foment white rage, resentment, and fear, this small cabal is moving the hate-based Right closer to widespread acceptance and political power.
Meanwhile, less-well-funded but equally passionate progressive movements are pushing hard for health care for all, free college education, and rights and decent pay for working people, all while respecting the entire range of minority rights.
Whoever wins the hearts of Americans and gets them into the streets first will transform America for generations, and if the turnouts for things like the Women’s March or kids walking out of school across the country protesting gun violence (versus the tiny white nationalist rallies that get so much coverage) are any indication, progressive America is winning.
But there’s still a long way to go: Tag, you’re it.
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/9-ways-trumps-authoritarianism-taking-hold
#26
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The Thom Hartmann Program - 1st hour - 10/31/2018
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#27
#28
...meanwhile, back to important issues...
Alexander Hamilton Was Obsessed With the Threat a Presidency Like Trump’s Poses for America
This isn't the first time our democracy has faced the founder’s nightmare—but it is the most dangerous.
Independent Media Institute, September 19, 2018
By Thom Hartmann:
Presidential economic adviser Larry Kudlow suggested to the Economic Club of New York that, after the elections, Republicans will target “spending” on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid with “reforms” (cuts) to help pay for the massive deficits created by Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut for billionaires.
Conservatives have controlled our government for three definable periods in recent history—the Gilded Age of the last three decades of the 1800s (progressives followed from 1901 to 1920), the Roaring 20s (progressives followed from 1933 to 1980), and the Reagan Era that started in 1981 and continues to this day.
Each conservative era has led to terrible suffering among working people, each ended in a wipeout financial disaster, and this one will probably be no different. Republicans have already radically cut long-term unemployment insurance, killed “welfare as we know it” (with the help of Bill Clinton), and cut the budgets of Social Security and Medicare to the point where it’s hard to get anybody on the phone. They’ve deregulated much of the fossil fuel industry, sold off public lands to mining and drilling interests, and slashed away at the EPA.
But this time, there’s a larger concern than the survival of the economy, the environment, and the middle class. This time, democracy itself may well be at stake.
The 2016 takeover of our government by Trump and his billionaire oligarch cronies could be the nightmare that Alexander Hamilton identified, warned us about, and then refused to believe could ever come to pass.
A little history is in order.
In the largest sense, today’s right-wing insanity started with the corporate and wealthy “conservative” backlash to the progressive and trust-busting policies of Teddy Roosevelt, William H. Taft, and Woodrow Wilson from 1901 to 1920.
In the spring of 1920, a presidential election year, Republican Warren G. Harding, famously corrupt and horny (he had an out-of-wedlock child the year before the election, and the rumor persists to this day that his wife poisoned the 57-year-old president four years later for refusing to stop his affairs), had secured his party’s nomination for president.
He ran on a platform that sounded populist, although his major goal was to return the oligarchs who financed him to power after they’d taken a hit from three previous progressive administrations. Harding’s main slogan was that era’s more modest version of make America great again: “A Return to Normalcy.”
The other slogan of his campaign, and, indeed, of his presidency, was privatization and deregulation: “More business in government, less government in business” was his personal favorite slogan, used also on the campaign trail.
Harding’s goal was to deregulate business, while outsourcing government functions whenever possible. And he did it, particularly the deregulation part, including “freeing” the bankers and stockbrokers.
Well-informed Americans of the time saw Harding’s policies as a recipe for disaster; we’d been through all this with the takeover of American government in the last 30 years of the 1800s, referred to by then as the Gilded Age, which ended with the “Great Panic” of 1893-1897. The robber barons of that era treated everybody except the morbidly rich as serfs, right down to fomenting murder and police violence to disrupt workers agitating for unions, better pay or decent working hours.
Thus, during the 1920 Harding campaign came H.L. Mencken’s famous quote about the willingness of the American electorate to follow hustlers, con men, and downright demagogues like Harding. On July 26, 1920, Mencken published an essay in the Baltimore Evening Sun that included:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Of President Harding’s rhetoric, as if foreshadowing Trump, Mencken wrote in 1921:
“It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
And were Harding’s followers similarly like Trump’s, and were his speeches like Trump’s rallies? Mencken wrote:
“When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly able to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.
“Such imbeciles do not want ideas—that is, new ideas, ideas that are unfamiliar, ideas that challenge their attention. What they want is simply a gaudy series of platitudes, of sonorous nonsense driven home with gestures. ... The roll of incomprehensible polysyllables enchants them.”
Mencken and the educated of his day saw great danger in Harding’s simplistic sales pitch that if we only let the very, very wealthy have free reign, they’d make everything right in America.
And Mencken was right. Harding’s election ushered in 12 moronic years of Republican rule, and along with it came massive deficit spending, widespread corruption and cronyism, a declining standard of living for working people, and a stock market fueled by deregulated speculation that was so on fire the era was called “the Roaring 20s.” And then, of course, came the inevitable crash that always follows “conservative” overreach on behalf of the rich.
But as corrupt as Harding was, both personally and politically, he wouldn't have been bad enough to frighten the people who founded our republic. That distinction has to go to Donald Trump alone.
Alexander Hamilton—himself an advocate for a soft oligarchy in America, and one of the founders who helped write the Constitution—had a nightmare about a group of hyper-wealthy people launching a multigenerational assault on the Enlightenment ideals of America, leading to the election of a wealthy con man as president. And it sure looks like his nightmare is all about Trump and his Fox News followers.
On August 18, 1792, when Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury for George Washington, he wrote a rebuttal to those who were skeptical that an American democratic republic could survive over time, when buffeted by the winds and forces of accumulated wealth and the love of some people for aristocracy.
Titled, “Objections and Answers respecting the Administration of the Government,” Hamilton started out by suggesting that as long as we continued to have regular elections, the oligarchs wouldn't be able to gain a toehold in government:
“The idea of introducing a monarchy or aristocracy into this Country, by employing the influence and force of a Government continually changing hands, towards it, is one of those visionary things, that none but madmen could meditate and that no wise men will believe.
“If it could be done at all, which is utterly incredible, it would require a long series of time, certainly beyond the life of any individual to effect it.”
He then pointed out that in 1792 we had a broad, diverse, and local press all across the nation and the highest literacy rate in the developed world; such well-informed people wouldn't be vulnerable to despotism, unless there was some sort of serious chaos—what he called “convulsions and disorders” that would be caused or exploited by “popular demagogues.”
“To hope that the people may be cajoled into giving their sanctions to such institutions is still more chimerical,” Hamilton wrote. “A people so enlightened and so diversified as the people of this Country can surely never be brought to it, but from convulsions and disorders, in consequence of the acts of popular demagogues.”
But if a group could take over the government and turn it against itself, deprive it of its protective function for the people and instead leave citizens to their own devices, Hamilton was somewhat concerned that a despot could take advantage of the ensuing chaos:
“The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy for repose and security.”
So, Hamilton reasoned, it wasn't the politicians who may step into the fray with an oligarchic message who were the “true artificers of monarchy”—it was the uber-rich who promoted the destruction of a state devoted to the “general welfare” of “We, the People”:
“Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy…”
These usurpers of the democratic order in America, then, would prepare the way for a true despot to rise to power, even in America. Hamilton may have had some concerns about men from his generation attempting such a thing; his next sentence was, “Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected.”
But it was unlikely anybody in 1789 had that kind of wealth or power; John Hancock, the wealthiest of the founders, had a net worth of only about $700,000 in today’s dollars. The first millionaire in America—in today’s dollars—was a shipping magnate who hit that level in the 1790s.
If such a thing were to actually happen, Hamilton wrote, it would be through somebody like the uber-wealthy, ultra-conservative Cato, who was a “harsh ruler” of his wife and slaves, and deplored the liberal Greek literature and sexuality that was all the rage.
“It has aptly been observed that Cato was the Tory-Cæsar, the whig of his day,”Hamilton wrote.
So, if a Cato-like man or group of people with massive riches were to succeed in taking over most of the levers of power in American government, Hamilton believed, our nation then would, actually, be vulnerable to a despot rising to the presidency.
Because that office of president includes “Commander in Chief,” the man would have to heavily flog his support for the military while, in secret, scoffing at the very idea of the liberty that would otherwise be insured by a truly democratic government.
This wealthy hustler’s main method to seize power would be to bring the government of the United States “under suspicion” while building a base of the “zealots of the day.”
“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate [hugely wealthy] in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanor—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
Hamilton knew that the uber-wealthy Roman senator Catiline tried twice to overthrow the Roman republic by a broad conspiracy of the rich combined with populist rhetoric, and the wealthiest men of Roman society put together his second conspiracy. Similarly, the later Caesars held power through similar means, splitting the populace against itself in a way that eventually led to the collapse of the Roman Empire.
Thus, Hamilton’s next paragraph was a simple and stunning warning to those who were entrusted with the “popular Government” of the United States:
“No popular Government was ever without its Catilines & its Caesars. These are its true enemies.”
The Catilines and Caesars of our era are the morbidly rich billionaires who have set out to seize control of every aspect of the political life of America, just as they tried so disastrously in 1920.
While we’ve always had wealthy people influencing politics to their own benefit, what’s happening today is something altogether new, as documented by Jane Mayer in Dark Money and Nancy MacLean in Democracy in Chains.
It mostly started back in 1971, when Lewis Powell wrote a call to arms to his friend and neighbor, Eugene Sydnor Jr., who was at the time a director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The “Powell memo” called for wealthy industrialists and companies themselves to fund a giant machine that could capture the U.S. government and turn it away from the protections for citizens and the environment that were being championed by Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader (named in the document) and toward a system that was, essentially, an oligarchy.
A small but incredibly wealthy number of what we’d today call billionaires or oligarchs were energized by Powell’s call to arms; they quickly stepped up and funded an entire right-wing infrastructure to bring this about.
Some started think tanks to influence public discussion and reframe issues of power and wealth along oligarchic Libertarian lines. Others funded a society for lawyers that could be a feeder system for getting reliably oligarch-friendly judges into state and federal courts. Another started a network of billionaires to pool their money to flip elections. And one even kicked off a 24/7 right-wing “news” channel to influence American public opinion in a way that would show up at the ballot box.
Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court in 1972, and Powell then championed the “right” of oligarchs to own politicians in the 1976 Buckley v ValeoSupreme Court decision, blowing up campaign finance limits by ruling that when billionaires want to spend their own money to elect or destroy politicians, that spending of money was protected under the First Amendment as “free speech.” (Citizens United vastly expanded this power in 2010.)
It was a long slog for the oligarchy. In 1980, when billionaire David Koch ran for vice president of the United States on the Libertarian ticket, most Americans looked at his platform and laughed. It said, in part:
“We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.
“We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
“We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.
“We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.
“We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.
“We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service. The present system, in addition to being inefficient, encourages governmental surveillance of private correspondence. Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free competition in all aspects of postal service.
“We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
“We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
“As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
“We support repeal of all laws which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.
“We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
“We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
“We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“We support abolition of the Department of Energy.
“We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.
“We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.
“We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.
“We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.
“We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.
“We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.
“We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
“We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.
“We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
“We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
“We support the repeal of all state usury laws.” *
* Notice what’s lacking from Koch’s list: abortion, prayer in schools, the Ten Commandments, Israel, or bans on gay marriage. All of these issues were added, in part at the suggestion of multimillionaire Jerry Falwell and billionaire Pat Robertson, to bring the rubes from the White Evangelical movement into the fold. Adding in guns brought in big money from the NRA. Combining these two factions with the Koch’s billionaire buddies produced the modern Republican coalition.
David Koch’s Libertarian vision was definitely not how most Americans thought our government should look.
Just a quarter-century earlier, President Dwight Eisenhower had weighed in on these Libertarians and John Birchers (Fred Koch, David’s father, as a big fan of the John Birch Society) and the Koch brothers’ spiritual forbearers, the oil-rich Texan Hunt brothers, in a letter to his ultra-conservative brother, Edgar. He wrote:
“[I]t is quite clear that the Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything—even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon ‘moderation’ in government.
“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.
“There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
But this wasn't an effort of a single generation, as Eisenhower had imagined and as Hamilton figured would always be the case. And it wasn't modestly financed by a few insider bankers and industrialists like Harding’s campaign. It was, rather, a multigenerational program, funded over the decades with billions of dollars, and with a national presence so large that the Kochs’ vast network now is better funded, is better staffed, and has more offices than either the Republican or Democratic parties.
Most of the original funders of Powell’s plan to turn America into an oligarchy are dead, but their multigenerational plan continues to roll along. And now many of the goals that Powell and the 1980 Libertarians first articulated—and Hamilton had nightmares about—are near completion.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of 5-4 decisions, has handed the power to alter elections to a few hundred billionaires and well-funded organizations (including foreign governments), and billionaire oligarch Trump has taken the White House with the help of billionaire oligarch Murdoch, Hamilton’s nightmare is nearly realized.
The question now is whether enough Americans have awakened to this reality to show up in November to defy the wealthy purveyors of fear and discontent who want complete and final control over our nation.
Tag, you’re it.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/alexander-hamilton-threat-america
#29
#30
HotCoffee,
I also just got back from the feed store with 300# of assorted seed. Farm stores fascinate me with their diversity of products.
FOX kicks butt and it is comical to listen to the lefties wonder why nobody cares about CNN & MSNBC.
I literally never turn on CNN but when a comment is made about their bias, it usually has a link and I do catch that. They seem to have a lot of asswagons on staff.
MSNBC is on for the first five minutes of Chris "tingle up my leg" Matthews just to watch him squint and spit at the camera. I want to buy him some teeth. He has aged ten years since Trumps landslide win.
Now, possibly the best two and a half minutes ever put on YouTube.
#31
10/4/18 from https://trofire.com/2018/10/04/into-the-business-of-punishment-in-american-private-prisons-w-guest-shane-bauer/:
The business of Private Prisons, Shane Bauer joins the program today to discuss his time going undercover as a Prison Guard in America’s Private Prisons. uncovering the corporations that make money off human enslavement. Thom Hartmann discusses.
#32
10/13/18 from https://trofire.com/2018/10/13/how-americas-white-supremacist-culture-keeps-the-most-vulnerable-on-edge/:
Starting a conversation on how vulnerable populations navigate a world that often seeks out to make life harder or harm them Thom Hartmann gets a call from a man who has to deal with both America’s racism and American indifference to the blind and disabled communities.
#33
DianeR,
Love the video!
Meadow the woman that owns the feed store is a lot of fun....Today she was handing out free cat albums for Pics of pets, really nice ones. I took a couple for stocking stuffers for friends with pets as well....too cute. She also has a ranch and often offers her customers free eggs. I then offer her something I made with the eggs...like potato salad.
Going to town is a social event as I run into customers I had at the hardware, lumber store. As opposed to computer hardware. Just got home and...
About to catch up on the news.....have a great evening!
#34
#35
10/1/18 - from https://trofire.com/2018/10/01/can-democracy-co-exist-with-billionaires/
By Thom Hartmann:
"Can Democracy Co-exist With Billionaires?"
Can Democracy Exist alongside Billionaires or should the question be rephrased to “Can democracy survive the existence of billionaires? Thom Hartmann discusses.
#36
OpEdNews, July 25, 2018 -- from the Independent Media Institute
"Trump Doesn't Have the Skill to Pull Off His Most Nefarious Plots"
By Thom Hartmann:
Trump just can't get things done, and we need to stop having conversations predicated on the assumption that maybe he can. His dangerous incompetence is currently risking war in the Middle East and Asia, while pitting American against American in ways we haven't seen in this country since the days of George Wallace.
For example, while citizens and leaders of the western world try to figure out what happened in Helsinki, Trump supporters are in plaintive wail mode: "He just wants better relations with Russia," they say. "What's wrong with that?"
In a previous op-ed, I posited three possible reasons for Donald Trump's behavior relative to Russia: that he's a witting or unwitting stooge, a wannabe dictator, or desperately broke. Several people noted, in comments to the article, that I'd missed a fourth option: "He's trying for world peace. Wouldn't better U.S./Russia relations be a good thing for the U.S. and world peace?"
Of course, it would be a good thing if the U.S. and Russia could get along better. It would be a very good thing.
Relations have been badly strained with Russia ever since we first started pushing NATO onto her borders (in ways that Reagan/Bush had promised Gorbachevwould never happen if he'd let the USSR dissolve), and Russia (in part, citing those broken promises) intervened in Georgia, Crimea, and Ukraine.
But Donald Trump is never going to untangle that mess: He simply lacks the skills, and isn't willing to turn details over to underlings who are competent. Instead, in Bolton and Pompeo, he has selected "hawks" historically hostile to Russia, which may be why he went out of his way to exclude them from his talks in Helsinki. It says a lot when a president is so incompetent he can't even appoint advisers who agree with his worldview.
He just can't do things competently.
This pattern has repeated almost daily since the election: consider how his other promises and actions reveal his distressing lack of competence and his failure to understand even the most basic elements of statesmanship and governance.
Donald Trump was elected on an "outsider" platform that, in significant ways, mirrored that of Bernie Sanders and progressive Democrats, earning him large swaths of former Obama voters. But his incompetence has betrayed them, and every world leader, looking on, now knows exactly what they're dealing with and won't be suckered the way working-class Americans were in November of 2016.
On entitlements, for example, Trump famously stood on the stage on April 18, 2015 (and multiple other occasions), and said, "Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid, and we can't do that and it's not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now, all of a sudden, they wanna be cutting it." (Bernie, of course, didn't believe him for a second and called him out.)
He can't do it on entitlements.
On trade, Trump took the position of the Congressional Progressive Caucus -- and every U.S. administration from George Washington to Jimmy Carter -- when he said he would protect U.S. jobs (and bring home manufacturing jobs) with the use of targeted tariffs. The last time we had a substantive national discussion of the issue was when Ross Perot challenged Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush for the presidency in 1992, and won over 20 percent of the national vote (correctly) warning of that "giant sucking sound from the south" that would happen if the U.S. signed NAFTA and joined the GATT/WTO.
Most Americans then, and most now, supported targeted tariffs. But Trump's all over the map, doling out exceptions to tariffs and trade rules when it suits his business interests or when he gets hassled by his wealthy Republican constituency.
Even worse, companies must operate over decades-long periods when planning to invest millions or billions into new manufacturing facilities -- but because Trump is doing what he is by executive actions (with a "national security" excuse that will probably be struck down in the courts) instead of moving comprehensive trade legislation through Congress, no company has the assurance that his protective tariffs won't simply evaporate the day he leaves office.
While tariffs should lead to increases in domestic manufacturing and, thus, more jobs, they aren't in this case because no company can take that large a risk on such an unstable president with an eccentric policy that has no laws behind it.
He just can't do it on trade.
On international relations, Trump repeatedly called for better relations withother nations, a goal that (outside of a few hardliners) is widely embraced, at least in the abstract, by both parties and the people of the world (particularly in Europe). Sadly, he's managed to damage or destroy our relations with all but a handful of autocratic nations, disrespecting and angering American allies who've been with us for centuries.
He can't do it on international relations.
On infrastructure, Trump parroted Bernie in calling for a $1.5 trillion national investment in America's crumbling infrastructure, repeatedly pointing out that since U.S. infrastructure investments collapsed following Reagan's huge tax cuts in the 1980s, we've let our roads, rails, and airports deteriorate to Third World status. But action since the election? He seems to have forgotten.
He can't do it on infrastructure.
On issues affecting women and children, Trump called for increased federal spending for child care, child tax credits, and paid maternity leave. The GOP in Congress and the billionaires who fund their campaigns and their voter suppression efforts simply laughed at him.
He can't do it on family issues.
On health care, Trump continued to insist, even after he was elected, that he would follow the Democrats' plan to change the law so that Medicare could directly negotiate prescription drug prices (ending a $600 billion windfall for the drug companies inserted by the GOP in 2005), and would provide "insurance for everybody" that was "much less expensive and much better than" Obamacare. Instead, he's changing the law so your insurance company can once again refuse to pay your bills if they can dig into your records and find any remote evidence of a pre-existing condition. Or simply dump you when you get sick.
He can't do it on health care.
On taxes, while President Obama signed into law the largest middle-class tax cut in the history of the nation, Trump promised an even bigger tax cut for working people. Instead, he and the GOP handed over $5 trillion in U.S. tax dollars to the billionaire and corporate class, while further depressing wages on working people.
He can't do it on taxes.
He promised to help out low-income blacks, saying, "What have you got to lose?" Turns out that, along with other low-income minorities and low-income whites, they're losing a lot, from the right to vote, to essential government help with housing, food, and health care. His white supremacist base seems happy with his "rapist"/"shithole" rhetoric, but they're being screwed economically by his policies, too.
He can't do it for low-income folks, people of color, or even the racists among his base.
Trump is breathtakingly incompetent. His businesses have failed repeatedly, foreign oligarchs are bailing him out, and he and Michael Cohen apparently broke numerous U.S. election laws just getting him elected. He couldn't even run a competent campaign for president, and without "a little (illegal) help from his friends" he wouldn't be in the White House.
He can't do it through politics.
Trump can't get his pitiful wall out of his own Republican-controlled Congress, and his brutal child-separation/detention-camp policies have horrified Americans across the political spectrum.
He can't do it on immigration.
He has utterly failed at health care, to the point that massive increases in insurance prices (and declines in the quality of coverage) are predicted for this winter when rates are reset, further hammering working families who are seeing their wages drop as the natural result of the ongoing Republican War on Unions.
Meanwhile, working-class Americans are further getting hammered with rising gasoline prices as Trump's newfound Saudi "friends" are laughing all the way to the bank.
He can't do anything successful for working-class people.
His tax-cut scam will, in the first weeks of October, collide with the Fed's program of unwinding quantitative easing (QE). The Fed will be looking for purchasers of $800 billion or so of Treasurys on their balance sheet, while the Treasury Department must find buyers for around $1.2 trillion in new debt to continue handing U.S. tax dollars to multinational corporations and billionaires. This, David Stockman told me, will probably push us into the next great depression.
He can't do it for the economy.
The drug companies are laughing at him (and pretending to go along by holding prices down" for a few months), his infrastructure investment ideas have been killed by McConnell and Ryan, and the GOP won't even discuss his (Ivanka's) campaign promises of more governmental help for low-income women and children.
He can't do it to keep us well.
Which brings us back to why I didn't include "Trump wanting better U.S. relations with Russia" in my list of reasons he's so utterly obsequious when it comes to President Putin and Russian oligarchs.
We all would like a win-win of good relations with the world's second largest nuclear power, but is Donald Trump moving us in that direction? The evidence shouts, "No, he can't do it." He's simply too incompetent.
If Donald Trump -- or any president, for that matter -- wanted to accomplish a rapprochement with Russia (or any other nation), it must be done systemically.
From the State Department to Congress to our military/intelligence agencies, a president committed to working things out with Russia would be realigning the levers of American power to consistently offer both carrots and sticks, holding a clear-eyed vision of the goals and needs of both nations.
He'd be working with NATO to resolve issues that are troubling to the Russians while, at the same time, informing the American people about the history of this relationship and how it got to this point. (Ironically, that last would give him something to bash Bill Clinton with, as it was on his watch that America broke Bush's promise to Gorbachev. Trump apparently can't even competently abuse a political foe.)
Trump grew up in his daddy's business, which he eventually inherited. As a CEO, he was an absolute autocrat, and never seems to have mastered the necessary arts of compromise and cooperation. His legendary business failures, frauds (yes, with convictions), and bankruptcies attest to his inability to accomplish things -- and also to his childlike belief that the way to "get things done" is simply by ordering it so.
That's not even how competently run companies work, much less entire nations. He's just a third-level grifter, and just can't do it.
Trump believes that if the "leaders" of a nation can get along, everything will work out. While there's actually a long history of personal chemistry between leaders leading to good results, dating back to the first years of our Republic and Jefferson's relationship with Lafayette, this all has to happen within a much larger and more institutional framework, and Trump can't do that.
Instead, Trump is handling U.S./Russian relations the way a small-time (non-public company, like Trump's) CEO would negotiate a deal between their companies. Except that a competent CEO would have had his underlings work out most of the details before the first meeting took place -- or at least immediately thereafter.
As if to flaunt his incompetence, Trump hasn't even yet told his national security team what he agreed to in his private meeting with Putin.
It's becoming pretty clear that he can't work out a deal with Russia, and meanwhile North Korea is openly flaunting their defiance of him (despite the superficial changes that have recently occurred). Even Trump's right-wing allies around the world are laughing at him: Bibi considers him a useful idiot, and the Saudis walked all over him (leading to millions of refugees in Yemen). Erdoğan is ignoring Trump's pleas to release an imprisoned American pastor, and Xi, other than swapping financing for the Indonesian Trump property for ZTE's future, is mostly ignoring him.
A few conservatives have tried to spin Trump's blundering in North Korea and Russia as being on the level of Reagan first "going off script" with Gorbachev, something that did actually happen and eventually turned out well (at least until Milton Friedman's libertarian "Chicago School boys" began advising the privatization of the former USSR's assets, but that's another article).
But the simple reality is that Reagan knew that government doesn't work like a corporation (unless it's an autocratic government), and therefore he let competent statesmen and stateswomen around him work out the thousands of small but critical details. Reagan at least had the experience of running California, with the world's sixth largest economy and layer upon layer of fractious politics; his policies were terrible, but he knew how to get things done. Trump doesn't.
Trump, in apparent thrall to the idea that he's America's "CEO President" or, worse, our soon-to-be Erdoğan or Mussolini, thinks he can have a "secret" conversation with Putin and he'll just magically charm Russia's far-more-sophisticated president into supine compliance with U.S. concerns.
Predictably, it doesn't seem to be working out. He just can't do it.
Trump should have learned from President Obama's successful negotiations, leading to world-turning agreements with Iran and Cuba, that there is a way to work things out with former adversaries. Step one, in fact, is to bring in all concerned parties, as Obama did when he successfully worked out the Iran deal with Russia, China, the UK, France, Germany and the UN.
But Trump just can't learn, and instead, like a spoiled child, he's now trying to destroy two of the most important bipartisan and multilateral accomplishments of his own country's early 21st century.
So, yes, we should all hope for better relations between the world's two great nuclear powers. And if Donald Trump had shown any competence at anything other than demagoguery and race-baiting, it should be included on a list of reasons why he's working so hard at his relationship with President Putin.
But the last two years tell us that Trump's Russia outreach is almost certainly more about the money he owes Russian oligarchs than any desire for our two nations to "get along."
It's a good thing for world peace and stability to have an American president competent in international relations (and domestic governance, for that matter), and it would be a good thing for the U.S. and the Russian Federation to have a good -- or even a great -- relationship; most Americans would be grateful and supportive of such a president's best efforts.
Proof of that is found in the early outreach to Trump from a number of Democrats, from Bernie to Chuck Schumer to Nancy Pelosi, right after the election. They each said, in various ways, "Where he's wrong, we'll fight him -- but when he's right, like on trade, infrastructure, or strengthening Social Security, we're prepared to work with him." I even said similar things on my radio/TV program, and meant them.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump turned out to be so incompetent that he couldn't even turn Democrats' "yes" into anything real, and his promises to do things for average working Americans -- or for world peace -- were simply lies.
He just can't do it.
Trump will go down as the most dangerously corrupt and tragically incompetent president in America's history, and the most it seems we can hope for is that he won't start World War III or flip America into fascism with his next tweet.
Those are the things, history tells us, an incompetent leader actually can do.
#37
HotCoffee, Meadow is the perfect name for someone who own a feed store. I miss the closeness of small town American towns. Glad you had a good day. It is nice to be a conservative. No stress, just enjoying life.
#38
#39
So nice to be a con.
#40
What would Jesus say?
#41
OpEdNews, July 30, 2018 - From Alternet
"Trump Is in Major Legal and Political Trouble — His Desperate Attempts to Escape Could Lead America to Catastrophe.
We should prepare for any drastic measures from war to martial law that Trump may undertake to escape his crises."
By Thom Hartmann:
Is it now time to imagine how far Trump and his Republican cronies in Congress might be able to push things? And how we, as Americans, might respond?
This isn't the first time such a question has been raised.
A bit more than a week before the election of 2016 -- a week before Trump won the election -- one of the few people on earth who's really and truly studied Donald Trump up close and personal, Tony Schwartz, granted an interview to the British newspaper the Independent.
Schwartz, who wrote Trump's book The Art of the Deal and spent months with Trump to gather information for the book, predicted that Trump would declare martial law. Not as a possibility, but as a near-certainty.
Schwartz predicted that Trump would do three specific things, although not necessarily all at once or in any particular order: He'd attack the free press; he'd compile an enemies list and begin getting revenge on those he thinks slighted him; and he'd declare martial law to solidify his power.
"When I said that," Schwartz told the Independent, "I got a lot of rolling of the eyes from people in the media and other people to whom I was making that case. I think today, people do really begin to understand that this is a volatile man with very low self control."
How would this happen? Andrew Buncombe, who interviewed Schwartz for the Independent, wrote: "Asked how Mr. Trump would go about undertaking such a drastic measure, [Schwartz] said many of Mr. Trump's supporters were police, members of the border guards force and the 'far right wing' of the military."
It's enough to make you think that Charlottesville was just a dress rehearsal for our version of the Brownshirts, and that Trump is counting on the support of these "very fine people" if he ever needs them in a pinch. Our very own version of Kristallnacht could be not far off.
For example, imagine that Trump, his family members, and numerous Republicans are indicted for actual crimes, and, particularly with the Nunes faction of Congress, for conspiring to conceal or obstruct investigations of those crimes. And the indictment comes right after the election in November when Democrats have won control of one or both houses of Congress, but Republicans are still in charge until January.
This combination would present Trump and his GOP with both a problem and an opportunity.
The problem, of course, is that Trump, Jared, Don Jr., and the Republicans who've conspired with Trump like Devin Nunes (for example) might all be heading toward jail, and possibly even impeachment after the first week of the New Year.
The opportunity is to create a constitutional crisis and grab even more power and immunity for themselves, possibly even "temporarily suspending" the 2020 presidential elections.
There are numerous possible scenarios; I'll just outline a few trigger points, and you can fill in the rest.
"Trump Is in Major Legal and Political Trouble — His Desperate Attempts to Escape Could Lead America to Catastrophe.
We should prepare for any drastic measures from war to martial law that Trump may undertake to escape his crises."
By Thom Hartmann:
Trump thrives on creating crises, and then "solving" the crisis he, himself created. He did it with DACA, with Obamacare, and with North Korea. It seems he's trying the same playbook with Iran and immigration/asylum.
But what if the crisis he creates in this case involved what looked like widespread violence?
The Constitution gives Congress (controlled by the GOP) the power to "suppress insurrections," while numerous laws including the Patriot Act and its successors give the president the power to declare various levels of emergency or even martial law. (It's been done before; Lincoln did it and even suspended habeas corpus, which was clearly unconstitutional.)
In 2004, the Congressional Research Service (a federal agency that researches legal questions for members of Congress) looked into whether a president could suspend elections in a time of crisis. They concluded: "While the Executive Branch does not currently have this power, it appears that Congress may be able to delegate this power to the Executive Branch by enacting a statute."
Is it inconceivable that our current Congress might do such a thing? Wouldn't it depend on how many people were in the streets protesting (after the election it was a million-plus) and how many right-wing open-carry armed thugs show up?
If Heather Heyer was only the first anti-Trump protester murdered by white supremacists, and dozens or hundreds more were to fall to the guns or bombs of Trump's Very Fine People, Congress may well consider it a state of emergency.
This was, after all, the exact scenario that Timothy McVeigh thought he would bring about. Following the Turner Diaries script, known to every white supremacist, McVeigh believed that President Bill Clinton would react to the Oklahoma City bombing with widespread gun control, which would cause all the good well-armed white people to start a killing frenzy against people of color and bring about the Aryan forces' "triumph."
And McVeigh's thinking on the subject is widely shared in the hard-right-wing underground today.
We Americans tend to think of ourselves as totally unique, but numerous democratic republics have gone down this or similar roads in past generations. As Trump biographer Tony Schwartz noted, "Just look at any country that has been taken over by the military. He'd say there is a threat to the republic and the military needs to crack down and he would start with curfews, and the stop and frisk of anyone who is not white, male and rich."
But what about the power of the Article III courts to restrain Trump, you might ask?
So far, with his Muslim ban and his brutal confinement of refugee children, Trump has gone along with the courts. But consider his presidential hero, Andrew Jackson, the man whose picture Trump hung by his desk in the Oval Office.
Not just the lower courts, but the Supreme Court itself told Jackson that he couldn't do things -- twice -- and both times he simply defied them. One was ending the second National Bank, and the other was the genocidal Trail of Tears.
John Marshall was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at the time. President Jackson simply ignored the earlier SCOTUS ruling in the constitutionality of the bank (McCulloch v Maryland), and ignored legislation supporting the Court and the bank that passed through both the House and the Senate.
Ignoring the law and legal precedent, Jackson proceeded to shut the bank down, an action that, in part (along with paying off the national debt), produced the deepest and longest depression in the history of the United States.
And when Marshall ordered him not to forcibly relocate the Cherokee Indians from Georgia to Oklahoma (indirectly; the case had to do with a Vermont man held in Georgia who was going to be relocated along with the Cherokee), Jackson was said to have bragged to his friends, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"
So, what if Trump were to simply follow the example of his hero, Jackson?
If Mueller used federal courts to indict Trump and his merry band, and Trump directed the police agencies of the U.S. to ignore the order (as Jackson directed the U.S. Army to ignore the Supreme Court and relocate the Cherokee, and they complied), then Mueller may find that he has precisely as much power over Trump and his family and friends as Chief Justice John Marshall had over Andrew Jackson.
This wouldn't just provoke a constitutional crisis; it's the very definition of one.
As Alexander Hamilton noted in #78 of the Federalist Papers, "The judiciary... has no influence over either the sword [President] or the purse [Congress]; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments." (Capitals Hamilton's.)
But Trump doesn't need a fight with Mueller in the courts to provoke a crisis: war works just as well.
FDR declared martial law in Hawaii (which wasn't even a state then) after Pearl Harbor, and [then-General] Andrew Jackson declared martial law in New Orleans during the War of 1812. (There's that name again...)
Provoking Iran or North Korea into a limited war may give Trump all the power he needs.
And, as George W. Bush noted to his biographer Mickey Herskowitz in 1999, war gives a president political capital. Bush even thought he'd get enough political capital from invading Iraq (this was before he was elected, keep in mind) that he could use it to privatize Social Security.
"One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief," Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker that Bush told him.
"My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it," Bush said, adding, "If I have a chance to invade... if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."
(Much like Schwartz writing Trump's autobiography, Herskowitz wrote the first draft of George W. Bush's autobiography A Charge to Keep. We should attend to the warnings of presidential biographers.)
Privatizing Social Security was very, very important to George W. Bush (maybe as important as staying out of jail is to Trump). Bush ran an unsuccessful campaign for the House of Representatives in 1978 in Texas on that singular platform.
And, after winning reelection and being sworn back into office in 2005, Bush began a campaign, traveling all across the country, trying to convince people privatization was a good idea.
As the San Francisco Chronicle's Washington Bureau Chief Marc Sandalow wrote the day after Bush won reelection, "President Bush proclaimed his election as evidence that Americans embrace his plans to reform Social Security... Bush staked his claim to a broad mandate and announced his top priorities at a post-election news conference, saying his 3.5 million vote victory had won him political capital that he would spend enacting his conservative agenda."
"I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it," Bush told reporters. "It is my style."
The more Bush traveled pitching the idea, though, the more people hated it. He ultimately gave it up, as Brookings reported.
But if Bush was willing to start a war with Iraq to get himself reelected and privatize Social Security, imagine how much more motivated Trump may be to start a war -- with anybody, anywhere -- if he saw his financial empire slipping away, his presidency imperiled, and his children facing jail time.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (that country's version of NPR/PBS) is reporting right now that Donald Trump is studying plans to bomb Iran as soon as a month from now. To quote the article that is rocking Australia right now: "Senior figures in the Turnbull Government have told the ABC they believe the United States is prepared to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, perhaps as early as next month, and that Australia is poised to help identify possible targets."
If Trump believes that Bush was right that war is good for politics and lifts war-making presidents and parties, perhaps this is his midterm strategy in the face of terrible poll numbers. Tragically, such a bombing could well bring Iran's allies, including Russia and China, into a larger war, triggering World War III in a manner similar to how World War I spiraled out of control.
Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, and early in the Trump presidency, it was nearly impossible to imagine the things that he would later do and get away with.
That failure of imagination has cost us dearly.
While the time for freak-out is hopefully far in the future, imagining and gaming out our response to some of the worst-case and most extreme possibilities is not at all a hysterical reaction. If anything, it's the essence of prudence.
What do you think he could do? And how should we best react?
An entire generation of Germans, Italians, and Spaniards are aging into their twilight years right now wishing they'd had such imagination in the early 1930s.
It's time for a conversation.
#42
OpEdNews - 11/1/2018 - From Truthdig
"Trump and Fox News Have Blood on Their Hands"
By Thom Hartmann:
It's already started. They're messaging, texting, tweeting, and even calling into my radio/TV show. Breitbart is even bragging that they got it on CNN.
"This killing in Pittsburgh has nothing to do with Donald Trump. He's not an anti-Semite; his daughter converted to Judaism and his grandkids are Jews! How can you blame him for the 'mentally ill' guy [a phrase used to describe terrorists only when they're white]?"
But the shooter, by his own words -- words that are almost entirely missing from most TV coverage -- acted because of what both Trump and Newt Gingrich have said was themainelection-year message of Trump and the entire Republican Party: Immigration by people of color.
As the terrorist himself posted on social media just a few hours before he walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh with an AR-15, he was going to kill members of a congregation that supported the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS).
HIAS (whose slogan is "Welcome the stranger; Protect the refugee") had designated October 19 and 20 of this year as the "National Refugee Shabbat" -- and when they did so, the terrorist posted on a right-wing social media site, "Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided."
HIAS was founded in New York in 1881 to help resettle Jewish refugees, but in recent years has moved many of its efforts toward other refugees, including people from Africa, the Americas, and people who practice Islam. As HIAS's president, Mark Hetfield, told the New York Times, "We used to welcome refugees because they were Jewish. Today HIAS welcomes refugees because we are Jewish."
Dark skin and "Muslim" are triggers for bigotslike the cowardly terrorist and his buddies on social media. In another post, presumably referencing HIAS, he wrote, "Open you [sic] Eyes! It's the filthy evil jews [sic] Bringing the Filthy evil Muslims into the Country!!"
HIAS used to have a link on its website to the 270 congregations in 32 states that were participating in the work to bring refugees into the United States (and elsewhere), although that link now just points back to their homepage (perhaps because the event is over, or maybe because of the terrorist's threat).
Noting the terrorist's pointing out that link to the congregations, which included Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, the Times of Israel reported, "To mark the organization's personal involvement, at the back of the hall, information on volunteer opportunities in the refugee and immigration committees of participating synagogues and HIAS materials were available for attendees to take home, including a bookmark with the words 'My People Were Refugees Too.'"
Apparently this festered with the terrorist, because just a few hours before he walked past those brochures and started murdering people at Tree of Life, he posted to a right-wing social media site, "HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in."
And in he went, guns blazing.
So, Trump and Gingrich and Fox are giving all-day, all-the-time coverage to a ragtag band of Central American refugees, mostly women and children, who are traveling together on foot for their own mutual safety, lying that there are Arab terrorists and evil gang members among them. This white American terrorist gets increasingly agitated by it all, freaked out that more people of color (or even Muslims!) might be coming to our border to legally apply to asylum, and decides it's time to take out one of the groups associated with HIAS, who is helping refugees.
It's a straight line -- through Fox and right-wing hate radio -- from Trump's rhetoric about immigrants to the terrorist himself.
Certainly this terrorist had a history of hating Jews; he had repeatedly posted on one of his snowflake "safe places" for haters, "Kill all the Jews!" and "There is no MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation."
But this wasn't entirely an anti-Semitic attack, by the attacker's own words.
A few days after another white terrorist ("history of mental illness," said the media) with Trump and Fox graphics and slogans all over his van attempted the largest political assassination in U.S. history, we now have the single most lethal attack on Jews in this country's history -- in part because their synagogue supported helping immigrants coming into America.
And all of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump.
This aspect of xenophobic immigrant-hating, along with the insanity of the U.S. allowing AR-15s and other weapons of war on our streets, must be discussed along with the horrors of anti-Semitism.
This is all one package brought to us by Trump, and it's beginning to eerily resemble a previous insecure man with little hands, a single testicle, and a big mouth in the 1930s who warned his people about both immigrants and Jews.
We all know how well that turned out for Germany and the world.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
#43
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The Thom Hartmann Program - 11/1/2018
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#44
Despite posting thousands of words trying to explain how awful Trump is, DS has still not been able to list even one thing that Trump has actually done that has harmed him. I suspect that no "honest" progressive/democrat/liberal" can list any actual harm either.
An acquaintance of mine challenged me to try and come up with some way that Obama had harmed me. Well, Obama tried to shut down my industry, or at least make it much more difficult for many companies to stay in business. Inhibiting someone's ability to make a living is doing real harm to them.
Has Trump kept anyone you know from making a living, for example?
#45
#46
Unless you are an illegal alien, I would like to know what harm the "racist" President Trump has brought upon the minority community. Be specific. And protecting the country against illegal immigration is not racist. If you think it is, then I can post numerous quotes from democratic leaders ranting against illegal immigration.
Unemployment among minorities at record low levels, wages/payrolls are up, etc. So how exactly is the racist Trump hurting minorities?
#47
#48
Naked racism is the knee-jerk, unspoken force behind the Republican Party and Dear Leader.
Just this week:
1) Republican low-information voters (trolls) are being manipulated.
2) Republican closing political ad for the midterm is shockingly racist.
3) Trump -- the essence of his presidency.
4) Trump's "reality distortion field."
5) Trump is lying to you in every way possible.
#49
Morning HotCoffee, Loved the Chicks on the right snowman link.
Here is a hoot from the hypocrites on the left. Democrat Senator tripping over his tongue kinda like Roseann except with a different result.
"Sen. Joe Donnelly says he has black and Indian American staffers, ‘but’ they’re terrific"
Have a good one.
See ya later.
#50
G'day DianeR,
Reasons to stop the caravan.....
Central American Caravan Poses Serious Public Health Threat; TB, Dengue, Chikungunya
https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2018/11/central-american-caravan-poses-serious-public-health-threat-tb-dengue-chikungunya/
Or why we used Ellis Island.
be back later.
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