April 19, 2021

The GOP stands atop an ocean of blood

America, John F Kennedy said, was like John Winthrop's idealistic "city on a hill." Ronald Reagan added the word "shining" to that description when he plagiarized Kennedy. And now Republicans across the country want to change the word "city" to "armed encampment."

Republicans in the Texas House of Representatives just passed a so-called "Constitutional Carry" law that would allow pretty much anybody over 21 to carry a gun, concealed or not, permitted or not, experienced or not.

Democrats offered an amendment that would've forbidden "domestic terrorists and white supremacists" from the gun-carrying "right," but Republicans voted that down.

The whole "city on the hill" metaphor was meant to evoke a nation that others would want to emulate. Apparently we're now there: Brazilian fascist strongman Jair Bolsonaro has proclaimed that he wants every Brazilian to have a gun "just like in America."

After all, his country has nearly caught up with us having the second highest Covid death rate in the world; why not have the second highest gun death rate, too?

The mass shooter in Indianapolis last week had had his shotgun confiscated earlier in the month after his mother reported he was planning to commit "suicide by cop." He simply bought two more guns, this time high-powered assault rifles so he could more easily kill eight people in a few seconds.

And those two weapons he bought weren't cheap: more money flowed into the blood-stained coffers of the NRA and their gun-manufacturing patrons.

As of last Friday, April 16, there have been 147 mass shootings in the US this year, a 73% increase over last year. Psychologists describe it as "a contagion," sort of like Covid. The more people do it, the more people will do it. We've known for decades that this is also how suicide works, which is why schools treat student suicide so differently from every other kind of death.

And, like with Covid, Republicans are doing everything they can to make sure that the contagious agent – in this case, a gun – is widely and freely available to anybody who may want it.

President Biden and the Democrats just proposed legislation that would limit gun magazines to no more than 10 rounds; Republicans are outraged.

After all, if you're going to wage war against your government because it's become "tyrannical" by offering things like free college, Medicare for All, and a wealth tax on billionaires to pay for it all, you're gonna need a hell of a lot more than just 10 rounds.

For most of the 18 years I've been doing my daily radio and TV show, I've been saying that, at the very least, we should regulate guns the same way we do cars. I lay out the details in my book The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment.

The gun should be registered with the state and that registration should renew every year just like a car; the gun owner should be licensed and must demonstrate proficiency and pass a written exam just like a car driver; and there must be an insurance company writing a mandatory liability policy so when someone's hurt or killed with a gun they or their family get the same kind of financial cushion they would have had they been hit by a car.

Now, Stephen Colbert has picked up the banner of "license guns like cars," and it couldn't be a moment too soon. Hopefully more celebrities will get with the program; it's not anywhere near as extensive a form of gun control as rational countries like Australia and most of Europe have undertaken, but it's a start that every American can understand.

Our country was founded on a set of values and ideals; the first to do so in history. Or at least that was the concept, and with every passing century we get closer to realizing those ideals.

It's time to re-capture John F. Kennedy's idealism and actually make America a "city on the hill" we can be proud of and others will once again want to emulate.

We start by ending our epidemic of gun violence and calling out the GOP for what they have chosen to become: a death cult committed to violence, bigotry, and the destruction of our planet.

Original post with links to sources at: hartmannreport.com

April 17, 2021

The Ku Klux Kaucus Will End in Tragedy

Well, now they’re just coming right out and saying it.

Several Southern Republican members of the House of Representatives have proposed a Ku Klux Kaucus that will adhere to “Anglo-Saxon” values and vigorously resist allowing any more people of color into America under any circumstances. They’re officially calling it the “America First Caucus.”

The original America First movement started in the autumn of 1940, with open support for Adolf Hitler, loudly promoting their fear that white people in America were subject to being “replaced” by people of color into the fabric of our country. Those engineering this Great Replacement, America Firsters believed, were wealthy, media-connected Jews.

It also openly opposed America doing anything to stop Adolf Hitler after his 1939 invasion of Poland, and was particularly against our engaging in any kind of military action against Germany’s leader.

At its peak, it had 800,000 members including future President Jerry Ford and future US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. It was largely funded by the mind-bogglingly wealthy rightwing families who owned Sears Roebuck and the Chicago Tribune, the “billionaires” of their day.

Dr. Seuss, who seems to be making a bit of a comeback thanks to Republican hysteria, produced one of the most famous America First cartoons. It shows a kangaroo named “America First” with baby kangaroos in her pouch labeled “Nazis,” and “Fascists.”

The movement’s leader, Charles Lindbergh, addressed the “Jews will not replace us“ issue in one of his most famous America First speeches when he said of Jewish Americans, “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.“

Small wonder that Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizona’s Paul Gosar, apologists for the traitors who attacked our republic on January 6th and fellow travelers with uber-racist Donald Trump, are the founding members of this new Kaucus.

In their introductory documentation, they argue that they’re only interested in promoting or voting for infrastructure that “befits the progeny of European architecture.” It doesn’t take a dog to figure out what that whistle means.

In fact, they are quite proud of the racism. According to a document obtained by Punchbowl News, the Kaucus’ main aim is to “follow in President Trump’s footsteps, and potentially step on some toes and sacrifice sacred cows for the good of the American nation.”

And what sacred cows might those be?

“[S]ocietal trust and political unity are threatened,” they say, “when foreign citizens are imported en masse into a country…”

As Donald Trump would say, they’re not talking about immigrants from Norway.

Republicans understand what the new Kaucus is all about, and a few who aren’t rushing to join are instead objecting to their racism and xenophobic hatred being so open and public.

Representative Liz Cheney, no shrinking violet but also apparently having a few scruples that must’ve skipped the previous generation, tweeted about the new Kaucus without mentioning it by name:

“Republicans believe in equal opportunity, freedom, and justice for all. We teach our children the values of tolerance, decency and moral courage. Racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism are evil. History teaches we all have an obligation to confront and reject such malicious hate.”

Her opposition will probably cause a few hundred more Republicans to eagerly join the Kaucus.

State-by-state organizations haven’t been announced, but it won’t be all that difficult for them to set them up and enlist members: all they have to do is buy the mailing lists for the existing Klan and White Citizens Council organizations in each of the Southern states.

America‘s most horrific crimes and our deepest wounds have always involved race. The largest genocide in the history of the world is arguably the near-extermination of Native Americans by European invaders. The slave trade to this country turned the South into a violent ethnonationalist police state. It’s Black residents lived in a state of terror that persists in many ways to this day.

We are still, this time by political proxy, fighting the Civil War, our nation’s bloodiest and most destructive conflict.

Greene, Gosar and others who are promoting this new Kaucus may think they are just conducting the most recent in a long line of racist GOP publicity stunts designed to raise their Fox News media profile and double down on the millions they raise every month promoting division and fear.

But, they are also giving aid and comfort to the traitors who attacked our Capitol on January 6th and tried, for the second time in America‘s history, to end our democratic republican form of government.

They’re contributing to the regional and racial hatred and fear that have, in the past, done so much damage to our republic and destroyed so many lives.

We’ve seen politicians use cheap and rhetorical devices like this to promote hatred and division in other countries.

Without exception, it has ended in disaster.

America must learn the lessons of its past. If we fail to, as the old saying goes, we shall be doomed to repeat our most terrible mistakes.

Original post with hotlinks to sources: HartmannReport.com

April 14, 2021

Is Genocide for Political Purposes Treason?

News that the Johnson & Jackson vaccine can cause blood clots in about one in 1 million women under 50 has exploded across the social media world. Republicans, along with countries that hate America, are smiling.

A fellow who runs a couple of communities on a popular social media site called into my program yesterday saying that the vaccine news had caused an “absolute explosion” of vaccine denialism. People who’d been on the fence are now outright opposed to getting the jab.

And Trump and the GOP are making hay with the announcement.

Discouraging Americans from getting vaccinated, and thus preventing President Joe Biden from getting the economy back on track, has been the first order of business for the GOP ever since Trump lost the election.

It is now their primary Electoral Strategy going into 2022 and 2024.

And, if the spam I’m seeing in my inbox and the trolls I’m seeing on social media are any indication, several countries that would like to see America fail are also enthusiastically encouraging Americans not to get vaccinated.

Tucker Carlson and Fox News are also pushing the “uncertainty, be careful!” meme.

Trump, of course, tripled down on the news.

He floated a bizarre conspiracy theory of his own, that he had promoted back in December as well.

Feigning outrage and using it to trash our new president, Trump wrote: “The Biden Administration did a terrible disservice to people throughout the world by allowing the FDA and CDC to call a ‘pause’ in the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.”

This is the same Donald Trump who, along with his wife, were both vaccinated while he was still president but went out of his way to keep it secret until long after he had left the White House.

He’s all about sabotaging Joe Biden. There’s probably nobody in the world Trump hates more, at this moment, than the guy who beat him badly in 2020. And he partially blames Pfizer.

“Remember,” Trump wrote yesterday, “it was the FDA working with Pfizer, who announced the vaccine approval two days after the 2020 presidential election. They didn’t like me very much…”

Warning his followers, once again, not to trust the American government, he added that the FDA “has to be controlled” particularly because of the “long time bureaucrats within.”

If you want to see what the US will look like if Trump and the GOP prevail and create widespread vaccine denialism and hesitancy, just look at Michigan right now. The British variant is ripping through that state, throwing huge numbers of people under 40 into hospitals.

This is exactly what Republicans want.

It’s the reason why the Republicans who control the Michigan House and Senate forced through legislation over Governor Whitmer’s unsuccessful veto requiring the state’s website to point out that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was tested on fetal stem cells.

Now another whole cohort of Americans are all hysterical about “baby parts” in their vaccines (they’re not) and vaccine compliance is starting to collapse in Michigan.

Sabatoge that Democratic governor!

It’s also why about half of all the Republicans in the US Congress refuse to disclose whether they have been vaccinated, and Senators Paul and Johnson openly proclaim that they won’t take a vaccine.

It has nothing to do with “freedom.” It’s all about sabotaging the Biden administration. And doing the same to any state with a Democratic governor.

Many Americans were shocked when they realized that Donald Trump’s deadly push to “open the economy” in September and October was just to try to get the economic numbers up so he could win reelection.

They’re even more dismayed now, learning that Trump and the GOP are actively working to sabotage any effort to get the pandemic under control so Democrats will lose next year’s elections and in 2024.

Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and his encouragement of the January 6 insurrection against our republic, were both treasonous and seditionist. He has demonstrated beyond any doubt that he is a traitor to our ideals and our nation.

But encouraging the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Americans is taking treason and sabatoge to a whole new level.

It took our media about three years to figure out and explicitly point out that Donald Trump was intent on destroying democracy in America. It took them more than two years to use the word “lies” to describe his…lies.

As Americans today are dying all across our country because of the vaccine skepticism promoted by Trump and the GOP, it’s more important than ever that all of us, including our media, call this what it is.

American genocide for political purposes. Treason.

HartmannReport.com

April 12, 2021

Republicans and "white nationalists" are playing with fire in their efforts to end democracy

Oligarchs Con White Bois

It’s no coincidence that Trump supporters, including those who attacked our republic on January 6 at the US capital, love to wave and display the Confederate flag. Somehow, they think, their whiteness will protect them from the consequences of ending democracy in America.

They’re wrong. The Confederacy was an ethno-nationalist police state, run by a small number of plantation-owning oligarch families like Robert E. Lee’s, and being white was no protection from the Confederacy’s brutality.

This sort of an iron-fisted oligarchy is exactly what people promoting white supremacy and “European” ethno-nationalism, want to impose on all of America. The Trump mainstream of the GOP is no longer a normal political party; it’s become an open advocate of the oligarchic values and systems that ran the South before 1865.

As Sally Hadden documents in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, each Confederate state’s “militia“ was also its slave patrol, and every white man who wasn’t part of the plantation-owning aristocracy had to show up for unpaid slave patrol duty at least once a week, traveling the back roads, inspecting plantations, and generally terrorizing Black people.

Cue the modern white militia movement. And the cops who threatened to kill a Black Army officer for having the temerity to drive a brand new car down the road. And George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, Eric Garner, Treyvon Martin, Tamir Rice...

But the Southern oligarchy wasn’t just about slavery and racism. It was an oligarchy that practiced absolute economic and political domination everywhere it had power.

Although they weren’t enslaved, poor whites had it rough in the Confederate states. They had no real access to due process, and in most cases were prevented from voting if they didn’t own land. Even when they did vote, ballot boxes were stuffed or ballots were burned when elections didn’t turn out the way the oligarchs wanted.

Through the period from the 1830s to the 1860s, as I document in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, southern plantation owners’ wealth radically increased because of the invention of the Cotton Gin that started spreading across the south in the 1820s.

This new machine could clean as much cotton as 50 hardscrabble white farmers or enslaved people; thus, those few massive plantations that could afford a Gin soon economically and politically dominated the South in the era leading up to the Civil War.

By manipulating cotton prices, giant plantations ran small white-owned farms out of business. The plantation oligarchs would then buy up the distressed farms and use the poor white farmers’ own indebtedness to force them to work what had previously been their own land.

When poor whites protested or tried to fight back, they were often imprisoned on trumped-up charges or just killed and buried in unmarked graves. As Keri Leigh Merritt documents in Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South:

"[P]oor whites made particularly inviting targets for a southern legal system dominated by slaveholders... On the eve of secession, slaveholders were still jailing poor whites for small amounts of debt, publicly whipping thieves, and auctioning off debtors and criminals (for their labor) to the highest bidder. In addition to the region’s sophisticated legal system, the Old South also had an extremely effective extralegal system to keep the lower-class whites in their places. From vigilance committees to minutemen groups, these organizations helped maintain both slavery and the southern social hierarchy, and ultimately forced a divided region to wage an unwanted war.

Matthew McConaughey made a movie about Newton Knight, a poor southern white man who led a resistance movement against the Confederate oligarchs. Ten of his white compatriots were lynched by the plantation owners and left hanging as a warning to others, but he survived and escorted Sherman in his famous march through Georgia in 1864. Over 100,000 poor whites fled the South to fight in the Union Army.

And enslaved Africans who fought back usually encountered a fate even worse than death: unspeakable torture, followed by more years of enslavement. The brutality of the Confederacy was legendary, and they wanted it that way. Those Southern slave-holding generals whose statues Trump wants to preserve were among the most evil, vicious men ever to hold power in the US.

By the time of the Civil War, the Southern part of America was no longer a democratic republic (if you could argue that it had ever been one). It was a pure police-state oligarchy run by a few thousand families who controlled the wealth of the South. Nobody, of any race, who wasn’t related to one of the oligarch families was truly free.

This is the nation oligarch Donald Trump and his followers want to create. It’s what oligarch-owned Fox News is pushing us towards.

Like multimillionaire Senator Tom Cotton pointed out in a recent tweet, “We have a major under-incarceration problem in America.” More people need to go to jail, according to fascists like Cotton, in the country with 4% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Eliminate the voting, economic and political power of poor and working-class people across the country, particularly those who are not white. Put more people in prison, especially minorities. Recruit poor whites to the cause by giving them people of color to sneer at and demonize. Toss them the bone of a “White Lives Matter” rally.

As Lyndon Johnson pointed out back in the day, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

And he’ll help make sure that the people in charge are billionaires like Donald Trump. The new plantation owners. The aristocrats. The oligarchs.

It shouldn’t surprise us that Fox News is promoting this kind of ethno-nationalism with talking heads like multimillionaire Tucker Carlson.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who would know, published an op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald calling billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch the “Cancer eating the heart of Australian democracy.”

“Murdoch is not just a news organization,” Rudd wrote. “Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far right ideological worldview. ... Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug who for many years has hired bullies as his editors.”

Trump, Tucker, and their fellow travelers have raised a small army of white people across this land. They strut around with their “open carry,” and freak out about the whatever the most recent conspiracy theory may be. They call themselves “patriots,” just like the Confederate soldiers and slave patrollers did.

They think that putting people of color “back in their place” will somehow lift their chances to experience the American Dream. As if it’s all some bizarre sort of zero-sum game.

LBJ was right. They’re suckers and they’re wrong.

Destroying our democracy, as billionaire Trump tried to do last year and rightwing media continue to promote, will only flip us into a fascistic oligarchy resembling the Old South.

Everybody but the oligarchs will suffer.

Original post with links to sources: HartmannReport.com

April 10, 2021

The GOP and Trumpsters are apparently willing to sicken more Americans to regain political power

The Republican Plot to Stop Herd Immunity & Flip America Into Authoritarianism

Well, it’s all out in the open now. Donald Trump and his homicidal cronies actively worked to damage America’s public health infrastructure, so 500,000 Americans ended up dying unnecessarily. All to push America deeper into authoritarianism.

Back in the Spring, we saw the Trump administration turn on a dime after the April 7th revelation that Covid was mostly killing Black people and was worse in Blue states. They actively walked away from initial efforts in March to get the Covid crisis under control, thinking that blaming things on Blue State Democratic governors would benefit them politically.

Which would aid their 40-year plan to take down democracy and replace it with corporate- and billionaire-run authoritarianism.

Now we see, in documents just unearthed by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Outbreak and reported in The Washington Post, that in the Fall, in the three months leading up to the election, the Trump administration and their Republican allies actively sabotaged the CDC.

All so they could continue to mislead Americans about the dangers of this disease — again, for political gain so they can push us deeper into authoritarianism.

History tells, and Trump well knew, that presidents rarely get reelected when they preside over an economic disaster. Thus, Trump was doing everything he could to push Americans back into the workplace and back into stores, restaurants and shops to juice the economy.

The result, of course, was an explosion of Covid cases and deaths in the last three months of last year.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

But that’s all history now. Trump is no longer running for reelection, and even pushing people to take Covid risks to get the economy going at this point seems like it would only benefit President Joe Biden.

Yet Republicans continue to push myths and scare stories about coronavirus vaccines, and to play down the seriousness of the disease, and to discourage people from getting vaccinated.

To stop this pandemic in the United States, we have to hit between 70 and 90% vaccination rates to achieve herd immunity. Yet this Republican reluctance to get vaccinated will almost certainly prevent America from reaching those levels of protection.

So why, after pitching “herd immunity” through the last four months of Trump’s presidency, would Republicans now actively work to prevent America from hitting a vaccination rate that would guarantee it?

Donald Trump and his wife, for example, were both vaccinated against coronavirus in the last weeks of his administration, but went out of their way to keep it secret.

Right wing media, including Fox News, continue to promote bizarre stories that contribute to “vaccine hesitancy.”

As a result, among rural people who say that they definitely will not get vaccinated, almost 3/4 identify as a Republican or Republican-leaning, and 41% are white evangelical Christians.

How does preventing herd immunity and encouraging the death of more Americans possibly benefit the Republican Party today?

The answer is fairly obvious: if they can prevent a Democratic governor or President Joe Biden from getting a handle on the pandemic, they can blame them for the failure. People will die, but they get their political gain, what they hoped for a year ago but missed (letting 500,000 Americans die in the process).

Seriously, it’s most likely that craven and disgusting; it’s simply a variation on what they did before the end of the year, but they miscalculated back then and it ended up hurting, rather than helping, the GOP.

Having learned that lesson, they apparently now want to inflict the same pain on Biden and Democratic governors who are today in charge and thus will take the political heat for any Covid failures.

Making Covid worse will also keep our economy depressed, which further diminishes the chances of Democratic wins (particularly governors and US Senators) in the midterm elections next year.

Some would call this assertion a “conspiracy theory,” but just look at what’s going on and what went on last Fall. How else can we explain Republican governors like Abbott and DeSantis actively working to promote more infections, and Fox hosts and guests encouraging people to avoid vaccination?

How else can we explain billionaire-funded rightwing websites and media outlets promoting scary stories about vaccine, or downplaying the damage this disease can do to people?

They’re apparently willing to kill another half-million Americans to try to gain and hang onto political power while strengthening their own authoritarianism by spreading fear and confusion.

And if it throws the nation into chaos, all the better for the authoritarians within the Republican Party who are thirsting for power.

That “authoritarian” word sounds like strong language, but, seriously, do you think that if Donald Trump had been able to get a few Republican Secretaries of State to flip the election for him and hang onto power, that there would ever again be a free and fair election in this country?

Not to mention GOP efforts to sabotage democracy across the nation with over 300 voter suppression bills sitting in State legislatures right now.

And when a country has abandoned democracy as a governing principle, what is left? The world’s two major authoritarian models right now are oligarchic authoritarianism (Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia) or capitalist-communist authoritarianism (China, Vietnam).

We’re definitely not going to go communist, and we can clearly see that flat-out racist, corporatist authoritarianism is the direction the GOP has been pushing America for forty years.

Citizens United is their governing principle, as it lets authoritarian billionaires secretly fund an entire spectrum of political and social media activity while undermining faith in democracy.

This makes clear the meaning of “the death cult of the Republican Party.” And the role of “conservative” and social media in this genocidal effort.

Getting to herd immunity is the key to restoring normal economic and political activity in America, and the GOP — from the federal to the state level — is actively working against it.

It’s time to call them what they are: authoritarians who want to take down democracy and don’t care if it kills another half-million Americans in the process.

Original post with CDC graphics and hotlinks to sources here: HartmannReport.com

April 9, 2021

Fear of the "Great Replacement" is now the major driving force in the GOP

How Will the White Supremacy Brand of Today’s Republican Party End?

So, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who does not much participate in the legislative process other than occasionally trying to stop it, and has lost all her committee assignments, raised over 3 million bucks in the last quarter.

A really good first-quarter haul for a freshman member of Congress who’s actually getting things done would be $250,000 to a half million dollars. Greene blew the doors out.

But why?

There was a time in America when “conservative” meant, “In favor of moving toward a better country, but doing it slowly and cautiously.”

We use the word “conservative,” in fact, to generically mean “cautiously.”

But the last five years have irrefutably shown that when American politicians use the word conservative these days, what they really mean is white supremacist.

White supremacy has become the central brand of today’s Republican Party, and, in retrospect, has been at the core of that Party’s explicit efforts ever since Richard Nixon’s 1968 Southern Strategy.

And for “movement conservatives” it really dates even farther back than that. Consider one of the top founders of today’s conservative movement (and of the National Review publication), William F. Buckley. In a 1957 editorial titled Why the South Must Prevail, he laid out explicitly what the foundation of conservatism must be.

“Again, let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote. “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote.”

No, this wasn’t just malice or performance. It was all about power, enforced by the state. And about defining, once and for all, the core animating principle of the newly resurgent conservative movement.

“In some parts of the South,” Buckley wrote, “the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”

He asked, rhetorically, if the South is “entitled” to “prevail” even in rural areas of the country or large cities with majority Black populations?

“The sobering answer,” Buckley wrote, “is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

So here we are.

Americans would like to believe that the people who sent Marjorie Taylor Greene all that money were concerned about taxes or trade or America’s standing in the world, but it’s obvious now that they are not.

They want to support a white congresswoman from Georgia because she, like Buckley in his day, is waving all the flags associated with white supremacy.

After she jumped into the Republican primary in the state where I lived for 13 years, she pushed out a series of videos complaining about an “Islamic invasion” of elected office, presumably referencing Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, and conflated Black and Hispanic men with “gangs and dealing drugs.”

She started hustling the 2020 version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion saying that Jewish Billionaire George Soros had something to do with the Nazis and is supernaturally controlling world events. And let’s not forget the Jewish space lasers.

This was so offensive that House Minority whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who had previously described himself as “David Duke without the baggage,” endorsed her primary opponent, and Congressman Jody Hice of Georgia withdrew his endorsement of her. She nonetheless won both the primary and the general elections, using Trump as a symbol of and for white supremacy.

But Greene is not the problem; she’s merely one of many, and a symptom of how widespread and popular white supremacy and white nationalism are in today’s America. These ideologies have become the number one animating force in Republican politics.

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats did a deep dive into which counties had sent people to Washington DC on January 6 to try to overthrow our republic.

The Project’s Director, Robert A. Pape, wrote in The Washington Post, “[T]he people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places were non-White populations are growing fastest.”

They also did two independent surveys early this year and found that, “One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the ‘Great Replacement.’”

The Great Replacement is what animated the white mass murderer in Christchurch, New Zealand as well as the white man who slaughtered 20 people at a shopping center in El Paso, Texas. It’s why white nationalist Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building.

It refers to the fear some white people have of being “replaced“ by people of color.

Using this hook, the Republican Party has explicitly rebranded itself in the last five years.

They’ve embraced statues of Confederate generals and oppose stripping their names from military bases. They are working as hard as they possibly can to stop Black people from voting, while demonizing cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit and Milwaukee with charges of “voter fraud” because, one must assume, they’re majority-Black cities.

“Make America Great Again” really means “Make America White Again.” And every white supremacist in America knows it, agrees with it, and will enthusiastically send money to any Republican politician who waves Trump’s white supremacist flag.

And it’s not just the GOP that has gone down this road. The White Evangelical movement is right there with them, with the emphasis on “White.”

This is extraordinarily dangerous stuff.

As Holocaust survivor Sidney Zoltak said, and was reported in yesterday’s New York Times, “The diabolic plan to annihilate the Jews in Europe was established in small increments. Way before the establishment of the concentration camps, the ghettos, the death camps, the mobile killing units, it started with words.”

Words that characterized Jews, gypsies, gay people and socialists as vermin, as invaders, as an infestation. Words like Donald Trump and his followers use regularly.

And the Nazis were in the streets, both in Germany in the 1930s and in America over the past five years, chanting things like, “Jews will not replace us.”

The first generation of majority non-white Americans is already born and entering school. There’s nothing white people can do to stop this trend.

Thus, white Americans in the GOP (the vast majority of the Party) are facing a stark choice.

They can go down yelling and screaming and take a lot of lives with them, tearing this country apart pursuing their “Lost Cause.”

Or, they can start working for a country that actually realizes the vision of America’s founding promise, that “All men are created equal.”

Original post with links to sources at: HartmannReport.com

April 8, 2021

Dear Joe Manchin - Want American Business to Invest in W Virginia? Raise their corporate income tax!

Most Americans, when they hear that President Joe Biden wants to raise the corporate income tax to 28% to pay for his infrastructure plan, think that means that every business in America is suddenly going to be hit with some kind of surcharge.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Businesses pay corporate income taxes on profits, not on revenue. If a company does $1 billion a year in business, but only makes $1 million in profit, they’re only taxed on that million dollars of profit.

And there are lots and lots of ways to reduce that profit. The main one, that American businesses used throughout the era from the 1930s until the 1980s, when the top corporate tax rate averaged around 50%, was to invest money in new products, build new factories, expand production and pay their workers well.

All of those activities are 100% tax-deductible, along with things like research and development, marketing, and pitching in for the community by building parks or supporting Little League.

While these kinds of investments build and strengthen businesses and their relationship to the places where they do business, they also reduce profits and thus reduce tax liability. If a company doesn’t want to pay income tax, all they have to do is not show a profit.

As an added incentive, corporate income tax rates, like personal income tax rates, are progressive. The more profit a company shows on their books, the higher the rate they pay in incremental steps.

In 2002, for example, while the top rate on profits over $18 million was 35%, companies that only showed a $50,000 profit paid corporate income tax at a 15% rate.

Every small business in America knows this, which is why very few small businesses in this country pay anything consequential in income taxes at all.

At the end of the year, small and family-owned businesses take whatever’s left over in their checking account that would show as profit-that-could-be-taxable and use that money to invest in tax-deductible new equipment or expand their business.

Having run small businesses for over 50 years, I can tell you that figuring out how you’re going to use what’s left over to build your business in a tax-deductible way is an annual December tradition from New Hampshire to California. And the companies that sell everything from copy machines to computers to office furniture know it: December is typically their boom month.

The corporate income tax keeps businesses on the straight-and-narrow. Which is why it’s no coincidence that the time of greatest prosperity for both American business and the American middle-class came when the top corporate income tax rate was at its highest.

A high corporate income tax rate, in fact, produces a pressure on businesses to invest rather than simply pass out money to shareholders and executives (both can be taxable) or squirrel it away offshore. It’s an important and necessary pressure that drives businesses to do the right thing whether they want to or not.

Given this simple reality, taking the top corporate tax rate up to 28% when it was around 50% through most of the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and early 1980s, and was 35% from Reagan’s time until 2018, seems downright pathetic.

Even at this rate, the top corporate income tax rate will be lower than it has been at any time since World War II (other than the past three years). We really should be talking about 35% to 50% as a top rate if we want to achieve the kind of corporate growth and wage increases America saw during the years before Reaganomics.

Joe Manchin and a few other corporate-funded Democrats seem fairly hysterical about raising the top corporate tax rate. They should relax.

If they really want American business to invest in America, if they want the factories in West Virginia to expand, the way to encourage that behavior is to give them an incentive to invest in that very expansion.

Raise their corporate income tax rate!

Original post with tax rate graphic and hotlinks to sources: hartmannreport.com

April 7, 2021

The 14th Amendment gives us tools that haven't been used in over a century

Radical Republicans Reach Out From the Grave: Congress Must Expel Some Members and Punish States

Four days after President Donald Trump and several members of Congress incited an angry mob to attack the Capitol and overturn an election he’d lost by over 7 million votes, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sent a note to her Democratic colleagues.

She called for Vice President Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, to begin a new impeachment process, and wrapped the memo up by saying “Your views on the 25th Amendment, 14th Amendment Section 3, and impeachment are valued as we continue.”

Pence ignored her call on the 25th Amendment (which would’ve allowed him and a majority of Trump’s Cabinet members to remove Trump from office) and the House moved quickly to impeach Donald Trump for the second time, an effort that succeeded in the House but failed in the Senate.

So, to hold Trump and his elected cronies accountable for their traitorous act on that day — and their seditious attempts since then to change election laws in state after state to make it harder for largely Democratic voters to have their votes counted — we’re left with the 14th Amendment.

Three amendments were passed after the Civil War to end slavery (except when a person has been convicted of a crime), establish equal protection under the law, punish insurrectionists, and establish the right of formerly enslaved people to vote. These are the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

They were written and pushed into law by the Radical Republicans, a group of anti-enslavement legislators who emerged as the country’s main power brokers after the Civil War.

They were led in the House by Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a former Massachusetts lawyer who defended Black escapees from the South trying to gain their freedom, and in the Senate by Charles Sumner, who’d been the victim of a vicious cane attack on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina’s Preston Brooks in 1856 over the issue of slavery.

The 14th amendment, ratified in 1868, establishes, in it’s first section, birthright citizenship and demands that all Americans be treated equally under the the law (an explicit effort to end the Black Codes).

Its second and third Sections, however, are the most intriguing in this context.

Section 2 eliminated the 3/5ths provision in the Constitution, noting that “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers…”

But there was a gotcha in there for states that continued to deny formerly enslaved people the right to vote.

It’s second sentence says “But when the right to vote at any election… is denied to… Citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged… the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in proportion which the number of such… citizens shall bear to the whole number of… Citizens … in such state.”

In other words, if a state won’t let, say, a third of their citizens vote in elections, they lose a third of their seats in the House of Representatives.

With appropriate enabling legislation, this could provide a basis for requiring states that past restrictive voting laws that disenfranchise measurable portions of their electorate to forfeit some of their members of Congress.

It’s a large stick that has never been swung in the history of our republic.

Section 3 is even more explicit about the members themselves.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

In other words, if you took an oath of office and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort” to other insurrectionists, you will be expelled from the House or Senate.

Based on this, Representative Cori Bush introduced a resolution the day after Nancy Pelosi’s memo, joined by a number of her Progressive Caucus colleagues (including Rep. Mark Pocan), asking the House Committee on Ethics to determine whether any of the actions taken by House members in support of Trump’s sedition, “should face sanction, including removal from the House of Representatives…”

There’s also a public call to use that section of the 14th Amendment to prevent Donald Trump from running for any sort of elected office in the future.

Following the passage of the 14th Amendment, until the collapse of reconstruction in 1876, Section 3 was used this way on multiple occasions, including to block elected Sheriffs from holding their seats or running for office.

At the moment, there’s no specific law on the books that provides details, in the modern era, for how Sections 2 or 3 of the 14th Amendment would be enforced. (Congress blew up its ability to do this with the Amnesty Act of 1872.)

But section 5 of the 14th Amendment clearly gives Congress the authority to pass such a law or laws that would give teeth to this Amendment: “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

While the Department of Justice and Congress are sorting out who among its members may have participated in this traitorous insurrection, Congress should also be preparing and passing legislation to enforce Sections 2 and 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Given how extraordinary an act of insurrection is (it’s only happened twice in our history), this new legislation should empower the House and Senate, with simple majority votes, to both bar insurrectionists like Trump from running for office in the future, as well as removing those members who gave “aid or comfort” to the insurrectionists.

Unleash the 14th Amendment!

So far, not a single elected Republican at the federal level has been held accountable for their complicity in Donald Trump‘s treason, although much of it was conducted in public and is still a badge of honor for some. The more time passes, the more difficult it will be to hold them to account.

Congress needs to act now.

Original post with hotlinks to sources: HartmannReport.com

April 6, 2021

Republicans & Trump have thrown Evangelical Christianity into a full-blown crisis

Can Depraved Evangelical Christianity Reform Itself or Should It Just Go Away?

(I'd clicked the wrong folder and posted this in DU Lounge; just deleted that and reposted it here in General Discussion)

Republican politicians are doubling down on exploiting religious people, and its now killing churches - and people! - in a way not seen in living memory.

We’ve watched absolute depravity wash across our politics over the last few decades, promoted by the same politicians who wave a religious banner to get votes. It ranges from a stolen election in 2000, to being lied into two wars, and having four years of a presidency with nothing to show for it except a tax cut for billionaires, the destruction of international relationships, and 500,000 dead Americans.

We had a president who raped women; made fun of mentally disabled people; tried to take away Obamacare, Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and unemployment from American citizens; and intentionally tore America apart racially and religiously just for money and power.

He ripped children from their mother’s arms on the border, and then tortured those kids for years, killing at least seven of them. He called Nazi white supremacists “very fine people,” tried to eliminate healthcare for poor Amerians, and vilivied refugees — all in the name of Christianity.

Prominent among the mob that attacked the US Capitol on January 6 were “Jesus 2020“ flags and Christian iconography. One group carried a large wooden cross, and hundreds of people knelt to pray before attacking the capitol on that terrible day.

The day before, January 5, a group of religious Trump supporters held a “Jericho March” in DC, carrying oversize crosses and singing hymns as they paraded in circles around the capital as if they were Joshua circling the ancient city of Jericho so its walls would supernaturally collapse.

This is not what Jesus would have done; supporting politicians was anathema to his ministry. He preached morality, not politics.

Throughout my lifetime, church attendance had been fairly steady, ranging from a high of 73% when I was born in 1951 to a low of around 65% when George W. Bush was sworn into office. This year, though, it hit 47%.

Fewer than half of Americans now attend church. Organized religion is collapsing across our nation.

Republican strategist Rick Wilson wrote a book titled Everything Trump Touches Dies. He’s right, and religion is the latest casualty.

Back at the founding of our republic, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had a running debate about religion and government throughout most of their lives.

Jefferson, like Thomas Paine, Ben Franklin and George Washington, was a Deist, essentially an atheist. He was convinced that one of the biggest threats to what he called “a republican form of government” was religion.

He was terrified that ministers or priests might run for political office, and even proposed what became Article VI of the Constitution, which says, “[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

Madison, a churchgoer, believed that America would be just fine with Christians in charge, but that the biggest threat to religion and our country’s churches would be their corruption by the government.

When he became President, Madison‘s first veto was to reject a piece of legislation that would’ve given a federal subsidy to a church in Washington DC to feed needy people.

No government should be giving money to churches, Madison said, regardless of purpose, and the proposed law he vetoed would, he wrote in his veto message, “be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.” He insisted the money go straight from the government to the poorhouses and not run through the churches, because he was convinced it would corrupt them.

Turns out they were both right. And the GOP has promoted both the harm to government and the harm to organized religion.

The Republican Party has been cynically manipulating Christians for political gain, particularly white evangelicals, ever since Ronald Reagan and his Vice President George HW Bush hired Bush‘s son, George W., to do “outreach” to the white Evangelical community.

In exchange for their votes, Republicans have repeatedly promised — and delivered — to block IRS enforcement of laws that a church cannot maintain their tax-exempt status if they engage in politics.

They’ve also poured literally billions of taxpayer dollars into churches to provide services from foster care to daycare to meals to medical services, all in ways that would’ve given President and “Father of the Constitution” Madison a heart attack.

Churches and multimillionaire televangelists, for their part, have returned the favor by preaching Republican politics from the pulpit and on thousands of religious radio stations across the country.

Rightwing pastors have become a fixture in Republican politics, as Jeff Sharlet chronicles in his book The Family. From $100,000 heated dog houses to multiple multimillion-dollar mansions to private jets, their embrace of the GOP has corrupted their own ministries and confused their followers.

And now, at the behest of Donald Trump and the Republican party, white Christians are literally killing each other. White evangelicals are the one, identifiable single group in America with the highest probability of refusing to get a vaccine.

Having lived inside the Reagan/Bush/Trump cult for decades, they’ve been conditioned to believe any old bullshit Republican politicians feed them.

So when Trump and his fellow homicidal Republican governors told them that wearing masks was not a good thing, and cast doubts on the vaccine (Trump and his wife got vaccinated, but in secret during the last weeks of his presidency), they were primed and completely vulnerable to crazed conspiracy theories promoted on the internet by hustlers and narcissists in America and hostile foreign governments pretending to be Americans.

As a Christian myself, and a person who agrees with John Donne’s sentiment that “every man’s death diminishes me,” this saddens me deeply.

On the other hand, setting aside the unnecessary deaths, it might be a good thing. The rot in today’s version of white Evangelical Christianity has grown so deep and so destructive that a wake-up call is necessary. Indeed, a reformation is needed, both in religion and politics.

From the days that Reagan was cutting deals with a generation of television preachers mostly interested in mansions and private jets through today’s preachers pushing politicized vaccine misinformation, the corruption of religion by Republican politicians has become a full-blown crisis for many parts of the church and her followers.

The depravity of Republican politics is killing religion, or at least what we today call religion. At the same time, conservative “religious leaders” have done their best to fleece Republican parishioners.

Will Republican politicians stop exploiting religion for their own gain? Will people of faith turn away from the modern-day Republican Caesars whose gnarled, depraved fingers are reaching out to them every Sunday?

Or will America end up like most Scandinavian and Northern European countries, with churches relegated to ceremonial spaces for weddings and funerals and political parties avoiding the subject of faith?

I don’t have an answer, but asking the question is vital.

Original source with links: hartmannreport.com