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thomhartmann
thomhartmann's Journal
thomhartmann's Journal
May 1, 2021
This week, President Joe Biden proposed plans to put America back to work, get Americans back to health, and rebuild our nation in a way befitting the greatness of our ideals. He’s also officially announced his support for voting rights and DC statehood.
The right-wingers and two Democrats who oppose him claim that he’s not representing the best interests of America, but instead is working for “Special Interests,” something the Founders of this country referred to as “factions.”
It’s probably the most transparent example of projection we’ve seen in decades.
For the last 40 years, America has been seized and largely controlled by what we would call “special interests” and the Founding Generation called “factions.”
Since the Reagan Revolution, the Republican party has exclusively represented the special interest factions of billionaires and giant corporations who don’t want to spend a penny of their money helping or building this country, but enthusiastically extract labor from our people and cash from our middle class.
Small wonder they’re so violently opposed to President Biden’s initiatives.
And, sadly, it appears that they’ve pulled, bullied or bribed Joe Manchin into their number with his recent statements in favor of the filibuster and against DC statehood. And Kyrsten Sinema with her famous thumbs-down on the $15 minimum wage; it’s definitely not the people of Arizona she’s representing with that position.
Back in 1788, James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” wrote about the danger of the kind of special interests or “factions” we’ve seen seize the GOP and much of our nation over the last 40 years.
“By a faction,” Madison wrote, “I understand a number of citizens…who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” (emphasis mine)
“Adversed” being the word used back at that time to describe what we would mean today if we use the word “opposed.”
Factions, in other words, were groups of people who were openly and nakedly opposed to what was best for the nation. And he saw them as the greatest danger this country faced.
Madison wasn’t talking about an abstraction or some highfalutin concept. He was talking about how some rich people will inevitably try to seize political power to screw everybody else. How, as he wrote, their own personal, selfish “interests” are opposed to the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
“Property” today generally means land, but in 1788 it meant “wealth.” Madison came right out and said, in Federalist 10, that the interests of those with great wealth are typically very different from the interests of average Americans:
“But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”
In fact, he said, one of the most important jobs of government is to prevent its own corruption by these wealthy and powerful factions.
“A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation....”
But what happens when those wealthy interests, the faction of the rich, are given the power by the Supreme Court to own politicians and essentially write their own legislation?
This was Madison‘s nightmare, and it’s the political system the Reagan Revolution and a series of conservative Supreme Court decisions have brought us.
Consider how badly our republic and the functioning of our government have been seized and corrupted by these wealthy “factions” over the last 40 years since the Supreme Court, in 1976 in 1978 (and tripled down with Citizens United in 2010), ruled that billionaires and corporations could openly own politicians and political parties.
Because these right-wing billionaires and giant corporations don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes or decent wages to their workers, our nation’s infrastructure – both physical, intellectual and human, has been in a state of collapse for two generations.
We’re told by Republicans that when workers want to have union representation they’re really just a “special interest” — a greedy “faction.”
They explain to us that scientists trying to save our environment or teachers trying to improve our schools are just greedy “special-interest factions.”
They lecture us at length about the “tyranny of the majority,” saying that although most Americans want a national healthcare system, free college education, and a fair tax system that will revive the American middle-class, we’re just pursuing our own “selfish, socialist agenda.”
They have created literally tens of thousands of websites and phony “publications” to argue their right-wing positions and push back against Americans’ concerns about everything from global warming to factory farming to air and water pollution.
They’ve been so successful at this that even the most benign Internet search typically pulls up mostly-right-wing content in its first 20 results.
The message of these websites, over and over again, is, “What’s best for the billionaires and America’s monopolistic corporations is what’s best for America. When average working people get things from government, that makes them lazy and produces Socialism.”
Madison — and, indeed, virtually the entire Founding Generation, including the half-plus who were not slaveholders — gives the lie to all of it.
As Madison pointed out and Alexander Hamilton amplified, “faction” is a group whose interests are opposed to those of the general public or the welfare of the nation overall.
Faction is poison to the body politic. Faction is a cancer that sucks the life out of democracies.
America is today overwhelmed by factions.
Factions like the billionaires the Supreme Court said could spend unlimited amounts of money buying politicians because all that money is no longer considered “bribery” but instead is “first amendment protected free-speech” under Citizens United.
Like the corporations that send tens of thousands of lobbyists to State capitols and Washington DC to spread around billions of dollars every year to buy the legislation, rules and tax policies they want.
Like the rightwing think-tanks paid for by fossil-fuel billionaires and their friends that fund rightwing professors in our colleges, write our children’s textbooks, and for 40 years have tried to convince us that anything Government does that is good for the average American is actually bad for “freedom.”
And, tragically, those factions have captured a few Democrats, as we see with Joe Manchin pursuing his own agenda instead of what reflects basic American values (DC Statehood & the For The People Act) and what’s best overall for the nation (rebuilding our infrastructure).
As Madison pointed out, a democracy cannot exist when the voice of the people is drowned out by wealthy, self-interested factions.
The Supreme Court brought us this crisis, but President Biden and Congress are today proposing legislation like the For The People Act, that will begin the process of mitigating the damage those conservative justices have done to our nation. And bringing the residents of DC, more populous than Wyoming or Vermont, into full citizenship in our nation is simply the right thing to do.
Rebuilding this country after 40 years of neglect; reclaiming our moral center in the world; and clawing back from the top 1% the trillions of dollars they’ve extracted from the American middle-class since the Reagan Revolution is no small job.
But President Biden and most of the Democrats have signed on for it, and if we are to prevent this country from sliding all the way into an authoritarian oligarchy dominated exclusively by the mutually parasitic factions of right-wing billionaires and the corporations that made them rich, we cannot stand by on the sidelines.
Democracy, as Bernie Sanders loves to say, is not a spectator sport. Tag, you’re it.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
The Cautionary Tale of Joe Manchin's Opposition to DC Statehood
Factions have been America’s biggest battle for 240 years, and if we don’t fight hard now, we could lose the whole thing.This week, President Joe Biden proposed plans to put America back to work, get Americans back to health, and rebuild our nation in a way befitting the greatness of our ideals. He’s also officially announced his support for voting rights and DC statehood.
The right-wingers and two Democrats who oppose him claim that he’s not representing the best interests of America, but instead is working for “Special Interests,” something the Founders of this country referred to as “factions.”
It’s probably the most transparent example of projection we’ve seen in decades.
For the last 40 years, America has been seized and largely controlled by what we would call “special interests” and the Founding Generation called “factions.”
Since the Reagan Revolution, the Republican party has exclusively represented the special interest factions of billionaires and giant corporations who don’t want to spend a penny of their money helping or building this country, but enthusiastically extract labor from our people and cash from our middle class.
Small wonder they’re so violently opposed to President Biden’s initiatives.
And, sadly, it appears that they’ve pulled, bullied or bribed Joe Manchin into their number with his recent statements in favor of the filibuster and against DC statehood. And Kyrsten Sinema with her famous thumbs-down on the $15 minimum wage; it’s definitely not the people of Arizona she’s representing with that position.
Back in 1788, James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” wrote about the danger of the kind of special interests or “factions” we’ve seen seize the GOP and much of our nation over the last 40 years.
“By a faction,” Madison wrote, “I understand a number of citizens…who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” (emphasis mine)
“Adversed” being the word used back at that time to describe what we would mean today if we use the word “opposed.”
Factions, in other words, were groups of people who were openly and nakedly opposed to what was best for the nation. And he saw them as the greatest danger this country faced.
Madison wasn’t talking about an abstraction or some highfalutin concept. He was talking about how some rich people will inevitably try to seize political power to screw everybody else. How, as he wrote, their own personal, selfish “interests” are opposed to the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
“Property” today generally means land, but in 1788 it meant “wealth.” Madison came right out and said, in Federalist 10, that the interests of those with great wealth are typically very different from the interests of average Americans:
“But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”
In fact, he said, one of the most important jobs of government is to prevent its own corruption by these wealthy and powerful factions.
“A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation....”
But what happens when those wealthy interests, the faction of the rich, are given the power by the Supreme Court to own politicians and essentially write their own legislation?
This was Madison‘s nightmare, and it’s the political system the Reagan Revolution and a series of conservative Supreme Court decisions have brought us.
Consider how badly our republic and the functioning of our government have been seized and corrupted by these wealthy “factions” over the last 40 years since the Supreme Court, in 1976 in 1978 (and tripled down with Citizens United in 2010), ruled that billionaires and corporations could openly own politicians and political parties.
Because these right-wing billionaires and giant corporations don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes or decent wages to their workers, our nation’s infrastructure – both physical, intellectual and human, has been in a state of collapse for two generations.
We’re told by Republicans that when workers want to have union representation they’re really just a “special interest” — a greedy “faction.”
They explain to us that scientists trying to save our environment or teachers trying to improve our schools are just greedy “special-interest factions.”
They lecture us at length about the “tyranny of the majority,” saying that although most Americans want a national healthcare system, free college education, and a fair tax system that will revive the American middle-class, we’re just pursuing our own “selfish, socialist agenda.”
They have created literally tens of thousands of websites and phony “publications” to argue their right-wing positions and push back against Americans’ concerns about everything from global warming to factory farming to air and water pollution.
They’ve been so successful at this that even the most benign Internet search typically pulls up mostly-right-wing content in its first 20 results.
The message of these websites, over and over again, is, “What’s best for the billionaires and America’s monopolistic corporations is what’s best for America. When average working people get things from government, that makes them lazy and produces Socialism.”
Madison — and, indeed, virtually the entire Founding Generation, including the half-plus who were not slaveholders — gives the lie to all of it.
As Madison pointed out and Alexander Hamilton amplified, “faction” is a group whose interests are opposed to those of the general public or the welfare of the nation overall.
Faction is poison to the body politic. Faction is a cancer that sucks the life out of democracies.
America is today overwhelmed by factions.
Factions like the billionaires the Supreme Court said could spend unlimited amounts of money buying politicians because all that money is no longer considered “bribery” but instead is “first amendment protected free-speech” under Citizens United.
Like the corporations that send tens of thousands of lobbyists to State capitols and Washington DC to spread around billions of dollars every year to buy the legislation, rules and tax policies they want.
Like the rightwing think-tanks paid for by fossil-fuel billionaires and their friends that fund rightwing professors in our colleges, write our children’s textbooks, and for 40 years have tried to convince us that anything Government does that is good for the average American is actually bad for “freedom.”
And, tragically, those factions have captured a few Democrats, as we see with Joe Manchin pursuing his own agenda instead of what reflects basic American values (DC Statehood & the For The People Act) and what’s best overall for the nation (rebuilding our infrastructure).
As Madison pointed out, a democracy cannot exist when the voice of the people is drowned out by wealthy, self-interested factions.
The Supreme Court brought us this crisis, but President Biden and Congress are today proposing legislation like the For The People Act, that will begin the process of mitigating the damage those conservative justices have done to our nation. And bringing the residents of DC, more populous than Wyoming or Vermont, into full citizenship in our nation is simply the right thing to do.
Rebuilding this country after 40 years of neglect; reclaiming our moral center in the world; and clawing back from the top 1% the trillions of dollars they’ve extracted from the American middle-class since the Reagan Revolution is no small job.
But President Biden and most of the Democrats have signed on for it, and if we are to prevent this country from sliding all the way into an authoritarian oligarchy dominated exclusively by the mutually parasitic factions of right-wing billionaires and the corporations that made them rich, we cannot stand by on the sidelines.
Democracy, as Bernie Sanders loves to say, is not a spectator sport. Tag, you’re it.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
April 30, 2021
Rudy Giuliani and his lawyers are suggesting that the reason a search warrant was issued for his premises and computers is “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Yeah.
A lot of us are suffering from that. It’s normal and predictable. Arguably, it’s a sign of good mental health. It means your psychological alert and defense systems are actually working.
There’s an arsonist and a burglar both actively working the neighborhood just down the street from where we live here in Portland. The arsonist has set several people’s home’s outdoor furniture on fire, and nearly lit up a house.
The burglar has broken into a couple of houses, including one that was occupied, mostly to steal computers, and last week he stole somebody’s car from the driveway of an occupied house just down the street from us. I saw it happen, not realizing what was going on but totally baffled as to why anybody would peel out of a driveway and speed down a residential street at 50 or 60 miles an hour.
At the moment, my neighbors and I are suffering from “arsonist and burglar derangement syndrome.” It’s absolutely normal, when you’re presented with a real threat in your environment, to feel a little “deranged.” We’re staying in closer touch with each other, upgrading security systems, and having more frequent conversations with the police.
(This isn’t unique to Portland, by the way. With a massive unemployment crisis caused by Trump’s criminal response to the coronavirus combined with 40 years of Reaganism gutting the middle class and exacerbating homelessness, every town in America is experiencing a surge in this kind of crime.)
Similarly, it shouldn’t surprise anybody that millions of Americans won’t feel safe, but will continue to feel “deranged,“ until Donald Trump and his authoritarian, democracy-hating, white-supremacist, gun-fetishist followers no longer play any kind of meaningful role on the American political scene and he and his criminal buddies are held to account.
After all, he could’ve responded to the coronavirus back in January when he told Bob Woodward how lethal it was, but he chose not to. It was just too much trouble, plus, as we’ve seen in numerous news reports, he realized in April that it was mostly killing Black people and mostly creating chaos in Blue states.
As a result, over half-a-million Americans are dead; that’s probably a few million American families who are feeling a bit “deranged.” People have lost their parents and grandparents, their children and siblings, their neighbors and loved ones to a disease that could have been controlled here in the United States as it was in Australia, Taiwan and South Korea were it not for an incompetent Con Man in the White House.
Trump nearly started a nuclear war with North Korea, and then went over there a couple of times to kiss one of the most maniacal dictators on Earth’s ass.
He sucked up to the butcher of Saudi Arabia, bragging that he blocked the investigation into the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and thus “saved [Muhammed Bone Saw’s] ass.”
He insisted that America’s own intelligence agencies were lying, and Russia and other countries that were friendly to him could do no wrong.
He and his family expropriated money from pretty much anything that moved, as they’ve had a history of doing for decades.
We’re now discovering massive overpayments to various Trump properties around the world from our federal government; he violated the Emoluments Clause — a core pillar of our constitutional form of government — as if it were some kind of a joke.
He conned his followers out of hundreds of millions of dollars, and continues to con them with the Big Lie that “election fraud” is the reason why Joe Biden is in the White House and Democrats run the Senate.
He surrounded himself with criminals, actual traitors, ne’er-do-wells, and outright grifters.
His guy DeJoy is still bent on destroying our Post Office because Trump thought it would help him win the 2020 election, and ruining and then privatizing it can make big bucks for GOP donors.
He did everything he could to destroy Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid and threw several million people off their insurance coverage. He severely damaged the Social Security Administration.
He tore children apart from their parents, several of those children dying as a result, and cranked up hatred against non-white people to the point that elderly Asians are being assaulted in our streets and other minorities are frightened to go out in public.
He spit in the face of decency and both American tradition and law when he made fun of people with mental and physical disabilities, and explicitly told police that they should “rough up” suspects who are supposed to be presumed innocent until tried and judged guilty.
He referred to actual Nazis as “very fine people,“ and encouraged the politics of fear and hatred as a sick way of enhancing his own political power.
He has repeatedly been charged with assault and rape, and then offered as his defense that the women who accused him weren’t sufficiently attractive for him to have bothered raping.
The women we know for sure he did have extramarital sex with, he paid several hundred thousand dollars to keep quiet, a felonious violation of campaign finance laws that would’ve landed anybody else (and did land his lawyer, Michael Cohen) in prison.
On January 6th he tried to end our democratic republic and turn it into a strongman authoritarian state like Turkey or Russia, leading to the death of four protesters and three police officers.
And so far, he’s been held accountable for none of it, although most Americans are hoping and praying that his apparent immunity will soon end. But, for the moment, the political arsonist and burglar Trump and his grifter family are all still at-large.
You’d have to be abnormal not to have Trump Derangement Syndrome right now.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
You'd have to be abnormal not to have Trump Derangement Syndrome right now
Count America In On "Trump Derangement Syndrome"Rudy Giuliani and his lawyers are suggesting that the reason a search warrant was issued for his premises and computers is “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Yeah.
A lot of us are suffering from that. It’s normal and predictable. Arguably, it’s a sign of good mental health. It means your psychological alert and defense systems are actually working.
There’s an arsonist and a burglar both actively working the neighborhood just down the street from where we live here in Portland. The arsonist has set several people’s home’s outdoor furniture on fire, and nearly lit up a house.
The burglar has broken into a couple of houses, including one that was occupied, mostly to steal computers, and last week he stole somebody’s car from the driveway of an occupied house just down the street from us. I saw it happen, not realizing what was going on but totally baffled as to why anybody would peel out of a driveway and speed down a residential street at 50 or 60 miles an hour.
At the moment, my neighbors and I are suffering from “arsonist and burglar derangement syndrome.” It’s absolutely normal, when you’re presented with a real threat in your environment, to feel a little “deranged.” We’re staying in closer touch with each other, upgrading security systems, and having more frequent conversations with the police.
(This isn’t unique to Portland, by the way. With a massive unemployment crisis caused by Trump’s criminal response to the coronavirus combined with 40 years of Reaganism gutting the middle class and exacerbating homelessness, every town in America is experiencing a surge in this kind of crime.)
Similarly, it shouldn’t surprise anybody that millions of Americans won’t feel safe, but will continue to feel “deranged,“ until Donald Trump and his authoritarian, democracy-hating, white-supremacist, gun-fetishist followers no longer play any kind of meaningful role on the American political scene and he and his criminal buddies are held to account.
After all, he could’ve responded to the coronavirus back in January when he told Bob Woodward how lethal it was, but he chose not to. It was just too much trouble, plus, as we’ve seen in numerous news reports, he realized in April that it was mostly killing Black people and mostly creating chaos in Blue states.
As a result, over half-a-million Americans are dead; that’s probably a few million American families who are feeling a bit “deranged.” People have lost their parents and grandparents, their children and siblings, their neighbors and loved ones to a disease that could have been controlled here in the United States as it was in Australia, Taiwan and South Korea were it not for an incompetent Con Man in the White House.
Trump nearly started a nuclear war with North Korea, and then went over there a couple of times to kiss one of the most maniacal dictators on Earth’s ass.
He sucked up to the butcher of Saudi Arabia, bragging that he blocked the investigation into the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and thus “saved [Muhammed Bone Saw’s] ass.”
He insisted that America’s own intelligence agencies were lying, and Russia and other countries that were friendly to him could do no wrong.
He and his family expropriated money from pretty much anything that moved, as they’ve had a history of doing for decades.
We’re now discovering massive overpayments to various Trump properties around the world from our federal government; he violated the Emoluments Clause — a core pillar of our constitutional form of government — as if it were some kind of a joke.
He conned his followers out of hundreds of millions of dollars, and continues to con them with the Big Lie that “election fraud” is the reason why Joe Biden is in the White House and Democrats run the Senate.
He surrounded himself with criminals, actual traitors, ne’er-do-wells, and outright grifters.
His guy DeJoy is still bent on destroying our Post Office because Trump thought it would help him win the 2020 election, and ruining and then privatizing it can make big bucks for GOP donors.
He did everything he could to destroy Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid and threw several million people off their insurance coverage. He severely damaged the Social Security Administration.
He tore children apart from their parents, several of those children dying as a result, and cranked up hatred against non-white people to the point that elderly Asians are being assaulted in our streets and other minorities are frightened to go out in public.
He spit in the face of decency and both American tradition and law when he made fun of people with mental and physical disabilities, and explicitly told police that they should “rough up” suspects who are supposed to be presumed innocent until tried and judged guilty.
He referred to actual Nazis as “very fine people,“ and encouraged the politics of fear and hatred as a sick way of enhancing his own political power.
He has repeatedly been charged with assault and rape, and then offered as his defense that the women who accused him weren’t sufficiently attractive for him to have bothered raping.
The women we know for sure he did have extramarital sex with, he paid several hundred thousand dollars to keep quiet, a felonious violation of campaign finance laws that would’ve landed anybody else (and did land his lawyer, Michael Cohen) in prison.
On January 6th he tried to end our democratic republic and turn it into a strongman authoritarian state like Turkey or Russia, leading to the death of four protesters and three police officers.
And so far, he’s been held accountable for none of it, although most Americans are hoping and praying that his apparent immunity will soon end. But, for the moment, the political arsonist and burglar Trump and his grifter family are all still at-large.
You’d have to be abnormal not to have Trump Derangement Syndrome right now.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
April 29, 2021
President Joe Biden, last night, gave one of the best presidential speeches and policy proposals of my lifetime. It rivals Jack Kennedy in 1961, and, if passed, will undo much of the damage of the Reagan Revolution of the past 40 years.
In the Republican Party’s rebuttal, without seriously addressing even one single specific proposal of President Biden, Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in that body, instead went out of his way to promote the GOP idea that, in his words, “America is not a racist nation.”
This, of course, is the main GOP sales pitch for blocking and refusing to pass any kind of legislation that might make up for 400 years of violently racist economic, educational and policing policy in the United States.
It’s the rationale Republicans on the Supreme Court used to gut the Voting Rights Act in their Shelby County decision, which led to numerous Republican-controlled states passing racially-specific anti-voting laws within weeks that they continue to promote and expand on to this day.
It would be wonderful if it were true, but tragically is, today, a sad lie and a fantasy.
If America is not a racist nation, why did we kill tens of millions of Native Americans, keep their descendants in poverty, and continue to this day to steal their land?
If we’re not a racist nation, why were most of the iconic buildings in Washington DC, from the Capitol building to the White House, built by enslaved Black people?
If we’re not a racist nation why was it the law in the United States until the 1960s to separate the races and even outlaw interracial marriage?
If we’re not a racist nation why was it the law until that era that immigration had to follow racial patterns with almost exclusively white people legally entering the country? And why is it that Republicans want to go back to those racially-based immigration policies, and keep referring longingly to that pre-1960s period?
If we’re not a racist nation, why is it that Black people are killed disproportionately by police? When was the last time you heard a white guy say, “I can’t breathe” just before he was killed by the police?
If we’re not a racist nation why is it the people with identifiably white and Black names receive different numbers of callbacks from prospective employers across multiple studies over decades? Not to mention the pay differential that’s so well documented?
If we’re not a racist nation, why is the Maga movement almost entirely white and why do they keep talking about starting and winning a “race war“ in the United States?
If we’re not a racist nation, why does the Department of Justice clearly identify the greatest terrorist threat to this country as American white supremacists?
If we’re not a racist nation, why did the President of the United States refer to Nazis chanting that “Jews will not replace us,“ meaning that they thought Jewish billionaire George Soros was importing people of color into the United States to “replace” whites, as “very fine people?”
If we’re not a racist nation, why do schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods consistently perform poorly, even when attended by white students?
If we’re not a racist nation, why is the average white family worth over $100,000 and the average Black family worth less than $6000?
If we’re not a racist nation, why is it that we’re surprised when we see a TV show where the hero is the Black guy and the evil person is the white guy?
If we’re not a racist nation, why do white guys keep walking into churches and shooting Black guys, and white people keep calling the police on Black people for walking, shopping, working, birdwatching, attending school, caring for their own children, or driving?
And when was the last time you heard about white people having the police called on them by Black people and that white person ended up shot dead or had his neck crushed by the cops?
If we’re not a racist nation, then why are our billionaires and business leaders almost entirely white? Why is that also true of the Republican party, both in its base and among its elected officials?
If we’re not a racist nation, then why are Republican politicians in every state they control working as hard as they can to keep Black people from voting?
Eliminating racism as an animating force in the United States is a worthwhile and noble goal. But for a major political party to pretend that we’ve already reached that, solely so they can ignore it as an issue and continue to maintain the racist status quo, is obscene.
We can’t solve our very real and serious issues if we don’t honestly confront them, and it’s tragic that the Republican party would choose to use this platform and opportunity to once again deny simple reality.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
Dear Sen. Tim Scott - If America Is Not a Racist Nation...
We can’t solve our very real & serious issues if we don’t confront them, and it’s tragic that the GOP would use this national platform to once again deny America's most tragic reality.President Joe Biden, last night, gave one of the best presidential speeches and policy proposals of my lifetime. It rivals Jack Kennedy in 1961, and, if passed, will undo much of the damage of the Reagan Revolution of the past 40 years.
In the Republican Party’s rebuttal, without seriously addressing even one single specific proposal of President Biden, Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in that body, instead went out of his way to promote the GOP idea that, in his words, “America is not a racist nation.”
This, of course, is the main GOP sales pitch for blocking and refusing to pass any kind of legislation that might make up for 400 years of violently racist economic, educational and policing policy in the United States.
It’s the rationale Republicans on the Supreme Court used to gut the Voting Rights Act in their Shelby County decision, which led to numerous Republican-controlled states passing racially-specific anti-voting laws within weeks that they continue to promote and expand on to this day.
It would be wonderful if it were true, but tragically is, today, a sad lie and a fantasy.
If America is not a racist nation, why did we kill tens of millions of Native Americans, keep their descendants in poverty, and continue to this day to steal their land?
If we’re not a racist nation, why were most of the iconic buildings in Washington DC, from the Capitol building to the White House, built by enslaved Black people?
If we’re not a racist nation why was it the law in the United States until the 1960s to separate the races and even outlaw interracial marriage?
If we’re not a racist nation why was it the law until that era that immigration had to follow racial patterns with almost exclusively white people legally entering the country? And why is it that Republicans want to go back to those racially-based immigration policies, and keep referring longingly to that pre-1960s period?
If we’re not a racist nation, why is it that Black people are killed disproportionately by police? When was the last time you heard a white guy say, “I can’t breathe” just before he was killed by the police?
If we’re not a racist nation why is it the people with identifiably white and Black names receive different numbers of callbacks from prospective employers across multiple studies over decades? Not to mention the pay differential that’s so well documented?
If we’re not a racist nation, why is the Maga movement almost entirely white and why do they keep talking about starting and winning a “race war“ in the United States?
If we’re not a racist nation, why does the Department of Justice clearly identify the greatest terrorist threat to this country as American white supremacists?
If we’re not a racist nation, why did the President of the United States refer to Nazis chanting that “Jews will not replace us,“ meaning that they thought Jewish billionaire George Soros was importing people of color into the United States to “replace” whites, as “very fine people?”
If we’re not a racist nation, why do schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods consistently perform poorly, even when attended by white students?
If we’re not a racist nation, why is the average white family worth over $100,000 and the average Black family worth less than $6000?
If we’re not a racist nation, why is it that we’re surprised when we see a TV show where the hero is the Black guy and the evil person is the white guy?
If we’re not a racist nation, why do white guys keep walking into churches and shooting Black guys, and white people keep calling the police on Black people for walking, shopping, working, birdwatching, attending school, caring for their own children, or driving?
And when was the last time you heard about white people having the police called on them by Black people and that white person ended up shot dead or had his neck crushed by the cops?
If we’re not a racist nation, then why are our billionaires and business leaders almost entirely white? Why is that also true of the Republican party, both in its base and among its elected officials?
If we’re not a racist nation, then why are Republican politicians in every state they control working as hard as they can to keep Black people from voting?
Eliminating racism as an animating force in the United States is a worthwhile and noble goal. But for a major political party to pretend that we’ve already reached that, solely so they can ignore it as an issue and continue to maintain the racist status quo, is obscene.
We can’t solve our very real and serious issues if we don’t honestly confront them, and it’s tragic that the Republican party would choose to use this platform and opportunity to once again deny simple reality.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
April 28, 2021
Bill O’Reilly spent months working to get Dr. George Tiller, calling him “Tiller the Baby Killer” 24 times on the air. His efforts finally succeeded when the abortion doctor was assassinated by a zealot in May of 2009.
In terms of creating chaos, pain and human misery, Tucker Carlson appears to be following in O’Reilly’s footsteps.
It’s the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump deciding that since Covid was mostly killing Black people in Blue states he was going to stop all government efforts to do anything about it.
And it wasn’t just Trump: the entire right wing media and think-tank crowd were in on it that month, as I documented in detail here.
And on this anniversary, it looks like the white supremacist right and their most prominent hero, Tucker Carlson, are trying to do the same thing all over again: Put the lives of as many people of color in jeopardy as possible, while gleefully making life as miserable as they can for them at the same time.
Until a few months ago, conventional wisdom was that “vaccine hesitancy“ was principally an issue in the Black community. There were shows about it, articles about it, and a concerted effort to convince Black people that Tuskegee was another era, medicine was more colorblind, and this vaccine really is what the government says it is.
Turns out the whole effort was unnecessary: Black people have known for a year that the risks of Covid are greater for them, and have been among the most careful in our population when it comes to wearing masks, practicing hygiene and getting vaccinated.
Which means when some ass comes along and says that white Fox News viewers should be calling 911 on people wearing masks, or parents with children wearing masks should be turned over to Child Protective Services, the weight of that state power will fall mostly on Black and Brown people.
If you think Tucker and his friends at Fox News hadn’t figured this out before they began this campaign, I have a bridge to sell you.
While it helped amp-up his sagging ratings and fed the perpetual outrage machine that has become right-wing media, what’s really going on here is that Tucker Carlson and his friends are encouraging a nationwide army of “Karens” to harass minorities who are simply trying to go about their own business and keep themselves and their children safe from a deadly disease.
He actually said, on national television:
“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately, contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”
While police power can be both brutal and deadly, particularly when directed toward Black people in America, the corollary power of Child Protective Services can also be downright terrifying to parents.
Louise and I worked in the field 40 years ago, and, as anybody who knows the system can tell you, the ease and capriciousness with which children can be taken from their parents can be absolutely shocking compared to the due process afforded people in the adult criminal justice system.
Low income parents, and particularly low income Black parents, often live in fear of Child Protective Services. Louise once went to court and got in a rather heated fight with a judge over whether 10- and 12-year-old siblings she represented should be removed from a group home because that facility’s vegetarian diet constituted, in the minds of the social worker and the judge, “child abuse.“ The judge wanted to put the kids in the county’s equivalent of a children’s prison, where they could be brutalized, but at least would get meat.
The system is confusing, opaque, and often is capricious and practically impossible to appeal. It’s one of the most frightening things you can threaten a low-income family with, particularly a family of color who may end up before a white social worker and judge.
And if the family is here without documentation, multiply that fear, terror and risk of being turned in to authorities by 100.
Which is why, of course, right-wingers like Tucker Carlson would encourage their white viewers and listeners to do exactly that.
Hard-right white supremacist commentators also want to make sure that Black and low income parents know that they’re promoting telling their white middle-class viewers to do this: it adds to the terror.
The fear of confronting the state can also change behavior. If Tucker and his white supremacist buddies can frighten enough people of color into not protecting themselves or their children with masks, they can increase the rate at which these “least of the least among us” suffer infection, disability and even death.
That’s a bonus: fewer people of color to “replace” white people…
This latest ratings stunt by Fox News goes way beyond bad taste or a cruel prank. It is a vicious, racist, intentional effort to terrify and harm the most powerless in our society.
It defines the word “reprehensible,” and those who program, promote and sponsor such hateful, petty and barely human behavior share responsibility for its consequences.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
Is Tucker Carlson Inciting Racist Police & "Karens" to Harm Minorities?
This latest stunt by Fox News and Tucker Carlson goes way beyond bad taste or a cruel prank. Its intention appears to be to terrify & harm the most powerless in our society.Bill O’Reilly spent months working to get Dr. George Tiller, calling him “Tiller the Baby Killer” 24 times on the air. His efforts finally succeeded when the abortion doctor was assassinated by a zealot in May of 2009.
In terms of creating chaos, pain and human misery, Tucker Carlson appears to be following in O’Reilly’s footsteps.
It’s the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump deciding that since Covid was mostly killing Black people in Blue states he was going to stop all government efforts to do anything about it.
And it wasn’t just Trump: the entire right wing media and think-tank crowd were in on it that month, as I documented in detail here.
And on this anniversary, it looks like the white supremacist right and their most prominent hero, Tucker Carlson, are trying to do the same thing all over again: Put the lives of as many people of color in jeopardy as possible, while gleefully making life as miserable as they can for them at the same time.
Until a few months ago, conventional wisdom was that “vaccine hesitancy“ was principally an issue in the Black community. There were shows about it, articles about it, and a concerted effort to convince Black people that Tuskegee was another era, medicine was more colorblind, and this vaccine really is what the government says it is.
Turns out the whole effort was unnecessary: Black people have known for a year that the risks of Covid are greater for them, and have been among the most careful in our population when it comes to wearing masks, practicing hygiene and getting vaccinated.
Which means when some ass comes along and says that white Fox News viewers should be calling 911 on people wearing masks, or parents with children wearing masks should be turned over to Child Protective Services, the weight of that state power will fall mostly on Black and Brown people.
If you think Tucker and his friends at Fox News hadn’t figured this out before they began this campaign, I have a bridge to sell you.
While it helped amp-up his sagging ratings and fed the perpetual outrage machine that has become right-wing media, what’s really going on here is that Tucker Carlson and his friends are encouraging a nationwide army of “Karens” to harass minorities who are simply trying to go about their own business and keep themselves and their children safe from a deadly disease.
He actually said, on national television:
“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately, contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”
While police power can be both brutal and deadly, particularly when directed toward Black people in America, the corollary power of Child Protective Services can also be downright terrifying to parents.
Louise and I worked in the field 40 years ago, and, as anybody who knows the system can tell you, the ease and capriciousness with which children can be taken from their parents can be absolutely shocking compared to the due process afforded people in the adult criminal justice system.
Low income parents, and particularly low income Black parents, often live in fear of Child Protective Services. Louise once went to court and got in a rather heated fight with a judge over whether 10- and 12-year-old siblings she represented should be removed from a group home because that facility’s vegetarian diet constituted, in the minds of the social worker and the judge, “child abuse.“ The judge wanted to put the kids in the county’s equivalent of a children’s prison, where they could be brutalized, but at least would get meat.
The system is confusing, opaque, and often is capricious and practically impossible to appeal. It’s one of the most frightening things you can threaten a low-income family with, particularly a family of color who may end up before a white social worker and judge.
And if the family is here without documentation, multiply that fear, terror and risk of being turned in to authorities by 100.
Which is why, of course, right-wingers like Tucker Carlson would encourage their white viewers and listeners to do exactly that.
Hard-right white supremacist commentators also want to make sure that Black and low income parents know that they’re promoting telling their white middle-class viewers to do this: it adds to the terror.
The fear of confronting the state can also change behavior. If Tucker and his white supremacist buddies can frighten enough people of color into not protecting themselves or their children with masks, they can increase the rate at which these “least of the least among us” suffer infection, disability and even death.
That’s a bonus: fewer people of color to “replace” white people…
This latest ratings stunt by Fox News goes way beyond bad taste or a cruel prank. It is a vicious, racist, intentional effort to terrify and harm the most powerless in our society.
It defines the word “reprehensible,” and those who program, promote and sponsor such hateful, petty and barely human behavior share responsibility for its consequences.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
April 27, 2021
Lore has it that Joe Stalin once said, “It doesn’t matter who votes; what matters is who counts the votes.” Republicans in Arizona are today engaged in an act of political treachery worthy of Stalin’s quote.
There’s history here.
Grab the nearest Republican and ask them, “How did John Kennedy win the election in 1960?” Most will answer, “Mayor Daley stole the election for him in Chicago.“
Complaining that the only possible way they could’ve lost an election is if the other side cheated is nothing new for the Republican party. The difference between now and 1960, however, is that in 1960 Richard Nixon had the common decency not to promote a Big Lie, and enough concern for his country — he served honorably in uniform, volunteering for sea duty in the Pacific during World War II — to not pit armed Americans against each other.
Today’s Republicans are an entirely different breed. Soulless psychopaths like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Marjorie Traitor Greene have taken over the party, and drawn to them the fringe psychopathic element that has always been part of American society but has never been so concentrated around one particular issue or ideology.
My dad was a Republican in 1960; I suppose you could say I was, too, because at nine years old I pretty much followed his political leanings.
But he also had a good job because of the machinist’s union, a contract he renegotiated every year on behalf of the tool and die shop where he worked, was a big believer in Social Security, and was proud of the fact that he’d gone to college on the G.I. Bill at no cost. Those were all positions that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and his Vice President Richard Nixon shared with my dad in 1960.
But my dad also introduced me to the psychopaths on the fringe of the GOP, telling me that I needed to know about “people like that.” A guy he knew from the local model railroad club was a member of the Michigan Militia, and they took me to a John Birch society meeting once.
At that meeting, I picked up a copy of John Stormer’s book None Dare Call It Treason, and reading about all the communists who’d taken over the State Department scared the living hell out of me. My dad reassured me that “those [Birch Society] guys are nuts,” and went on to point out that the Dixiecrat racists like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the Democratic Party were worse than anybody in the GOP.
Richard Nixon, in fact, later supported the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and school desegregation, as did my dad. Even Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” which he, Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes hatched later, in 1968, seems tame by comparison to the virulence of today’s Republican racists.
This isn’t to praise Nixon; he was a venal, greedy, corrupt SOB. But he at least had the decency to resign when he got busted.
Republicans today are very, very different; they’re actively doing everything they can to destroy democracy in the United States. In this, they are being cheered on by autocrats around the world, and in many cases assisted by those very autocrats with big bucks and covert efforts on social media, as Robert Mueller found.
With few exceptions, today’s GOP is doing everything it can to tear America apart, pitting us against each other along lines of regionalism, gender, race, religion, education and even the use of American iconography like the flag and the national anthem.
And now they’re even encouraging sickness and death among Americans by trying to discourage us from getting vaccinated, all to prevent President Biden from getting America and the American economy back on track.
That’s pretty bad, but the Big Lie of voter fraud and the “lost cause” of Donald Trump’s 2020 election is the one that will live on for generations.
After all, Jack Kennedy could’ve lost the entire state of Illinois but still would’ve had enough electoral votes (he won 303 to 219) to become president. He didn’t need Chicago. On top of that, Republicans insisted on, and got, two separate audits of the vote in Illinois, one immediately after the election and one in 1961 after Kennedy’s inauguration, and both showed that Kennedy won. But Republicans still think Mayor Daley somehow won the day for JFK. The persistence of political grievance is extraordinary.
Republicans today, however, are trying to set up more than just a myth of political victimhood. They’re trying to destroy faith in America’s core democratic institution of the vote so they can control and manipulate it in the future — to their own benefit — with impunity.
The effort underway with the phony staged “audit” in Arizona will, no doubt, produce “questions” about the election, even though Republican officials in that state supervised three separate and comprehensive audits overseen by the media that found no evidence whatsoever of election-altering fraud.
It will be used to justify increasingly draconian limits on who can vote and increasingly partisan control over which votes are to be counted and which are to be discarded in future elections.
They were willing to overturn the 2020 election: can there be any doubt they are more than willing now to rig future elections?
Thomas Paine once referred to the vote as the “beating heart of democracy.” Republicans are going after it with an ice pick.
This isn’t just a fight for the survival of The Democratic party or even fair and clean elections and functioning politics.
The endgame here, for the Republicans engaging in this vicious attack on our republic, is to end the American experiment and turn us into an authoritarian country that more closely resembles Turkey, Hungary or Russia. (For a deep dive, this is the topic of my most recent book, The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.)
Right now there are only two things standing in their way.
The first is public outrage, which is building but can easily be displaced by a big news event like a disaster, a terrorist act or another Trump-follower attack on the Capitol.
The second is HR1/SB1, the “For The People Act,” which reduces the power of dark money and establishes national standards for clean elections; it has passed the House but is hanging under the hammer of McConnel’s filibuster in the Senate.
In an email I received this week from Freedomworks, the Koch-founded organization that brought us the Tea Party, they bragged about how they helped put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court:
Now’s they’re turning their millions and their efforts toward blocking the For The People Act, which they complain, “would also require 501(c)(4) organizations (like FreedomWorks) to expose the names of donors, leaving them vulnerable to the Left’s ‘cancel culture’ mob attacks.”
If we are to succeed in blocking oligarchy and restoring democracy to America, now is the time to call your Senators at 202-224-3121 and let them know you support ending the filibuster and passing the For The People Act.
Original post with links: HartmannReport.com
The Hidden Secret Behind the Arizona ballot Counting
Republicans are channeling Joseph Stalin who once suggested, “It doesn’t matter who votes; what matters is who counts the votes.”Lore has it that Joe Stalin once said, “It doesn’t matter who votes; what matters is who counts the votes.” Republicans in Arizona are today engaged in an act of political treachery worthy of Stalin’s quote.
There’s history here.
Grab the nearest Republican and ask them, “How did John Kennedy win the election in 1960?” Most will answer, “Mayor Daley stole the election for him in Chicago.“
Complaining that the only possible way they could’ve lost an election is if the other side cheated is nothing new for the Republican party. The difference between now and 1960, however, is that in 1960 Richard Nixon had the common decency not to promote a Big Lie, and enough concern for his country — he served honorably in uniform, volunteering for sea duty in the Pacific during World War II — to not pit armed Americans against each other.
Today’s Republicans are an entirely different breed. Soulless psychopaths like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Marjorie Traitor Greene have taken over the party, and drawn to them the fringe psychopathic element that has always been part of American society but has never been so concentrated around one particular issue or ideology.
My dad was a Republican in 1960; I suppose you could say I was, too, because at nine years old I pretty much followed his political leanings.
But he also had a good job because of the machinist’s union, a contract he renegotiated every year on behalf of the tool and die shop where he worked, was a big believer in Social Security, and was proud of the fact that he’d gone to college on the G.I. Bill at no cost. Those were all positions that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and his Vice President Richard Nixon shared with my dad in 1960.
But my dad also introduced me to the psychopaths on the fringe of the GOP, telling me that I needed to know about “people like that.” A guy he knew from the local model railroad club was a member of the Michigan Militia, and they took me to a John Birch society meeting once.
At that meeting, I picked up a copy of John Stormer’s book None Dare Call It Treason, and reading about all the communists who’d taken over the State Department scared the living hell out of me. My dad reassured me that “those [Birch Society] guys are nuts,” and went on to point out that the Dixiecrat racists like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the Democratic Party were worse than anybody in the GOP.
Richard Nixon, in fact, later supported the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and school desegregation, as did my dad. Even Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” which he, Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes hatched later, in 1968, seems tame by comparison to the virulence of today’s Republican racists.
This isn’t to praise Nixon; he was a venal, greedy, corrupt SOB. But he at least had the decency to resign when he got busted.
Republicans today are very, very different; they’re actively doing everything they can to destroy democracy in the United States. In this, they are being cheered on by autocrats around the world, and in many cases assisted by those very autocrats with big bucks and covert efforts on social media, as Robert Mueller found.
With few exceptions, today’s GOP is doing everything it can to tear America apart, pitting us against each other along lines of regionalism, gender, race, religion, education and even the use of American iconography like the flag and the national anthem.
And now they’re even encouraging sickness and death among Americans by trying to discourage us from getting vaccinated, all to prevent President Biden from getting America and the American economy back on track.
That’s pretty bad, but the Big Lie of voter fraud and the “lost cause” of Donald Trump’s 2020 election is the one that will live on for generations.
After all, Jack Kennedy could’ve lost the entire state of Illinois but still would’ve had enough electoral votes (he won 303 to 219) to become president. He didn’t need Chicago. On top of that, Republicans insisted on, and got, two separate audits of the vote in Illinois, one immediately after the election and one in 1961 after Kennedy’s inauguration, and both showed that Kennedy won. But Republicans still think Mayor Daley somehow won the day for JFK. The persistence of political grievance is extraordinary.
Republicans today, however, are trying to set up more than just a myth of political victimhood. They’re trying to destroy faith in America’s core democratic institution of the vote so they can control and manipulate it in the future — to their own benefit — with impunity.
The effort underway with the phony staged “audit” in Arizona will, no doubt, produce “questions” about the election, even though Republican officials in that state supervised three separate and comprehensive audits overseen by the media that found no evidence whatsoever of election-altering fraud.
It will be used to justify increasingly draconian limits on who can vote and increasingly partisan control over which votes are to be counted and which are to be discarded in future elections.
They were willing to overturn the 2020 election: can there be any doubt they are more than willing now to rig future elections?
Thomas Paine once referred to the vote as the “beating heart of democracy.” Republicans are going after it with an ice pick.
This isn’t just a fight for the survival of The Democratic party or even fair and clean elections and functioning politics.
The endgame here, for the Republicans engaging in this vicious attack on our republic, is to end the American experiment and turn us into an authoritarian country that more closely resembles Turkey, Hungary or Russia. (For a deep dive, this is the topic of my most recent book, The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.)
Right now there are only two things standing in their way.
The first is public outrage, which is building but can easily be displaced by a big news event like a disaster, a terrorist act or another Trump-follower attack on the Capitol.
The second is HR1/SB1, the “For The People Act,” which reduces the power of dark money and establishes national standards for clean elections; it has passed the House but is hanging under the hammer of McConnel’s filibuster in the Senate.
In an email I received this week from Freedomworks, the Koch-founded organization that brought us the Tea Party, they bragged about how they helped put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court:
We Reached over 11 million activists in support of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. In a matter of only a few weeks, FreedomWorks reached over 9.8 million Americans on Facebook, reached more than 1.4 million on Instagram, generated 500,000 peer-to-peer texts in eight target states, and delivered 49,870 emails to the Senate all in support of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme
Now’s they’re turning their millions and their efforts toward blocking the For The People Act, which they complain, “would also require 501(c)(4) organizations (like FreedomWorks) to expose the names of donors, leaving them vulnerable to the Left’s ‘cancel culture’ mob attacks.”
If we are to succeed in blocking oligarchy and restoring democracy to America, now is the time to call your Senators at 202-224-3121 and let them know you support ending the filibuster and passing the For The People Act.
Original post with links: HartmannReport.com
April 26, 2021
Americans thought January 6 was the peak of the effort to end democracy in America and replace it with strongman authoritarian rule. But January 6 was merely the tip of the iceberg.
And it’s not just about Donald Trump. This “iceberg” monster that threatens to sink the United States is about ending democracy altogether here and replacing it with a wealthy, white aristocratic oligarchy.
The less visible but largest part of that iceberg is in the states, and it’s huge.
Red state after red state is nakedly and openly flipping from democracy to a form of authoritarian oligarchy.
Authoritarian Republicans at the state level, in state after state, are criminalizing protest with such severe penalties that simply stepping off the sidewalk and into the street during a protest could land you 15 years in jail.
At the same time, they’re legalizing the murder of pro-democracy, anti-fascist protesters.
The man who killed Heather Heyer and wounded numerous others at the Charlottesville Nazi/Trump rally with his car, for example, could well now be found not-guilty if legislation that has already passed in one state and is pending in multiple others were to pass in Virginia.
These new laws say that any motorist who is trying to “flee a riot“ and injures or kills people in the process can be held harmless. It’s the protest/automobile equivalent of “stand your ground laws.“
Finally, and most alarming, these authoritarian Republicans are seizing control of the actual mechanism of voting.
We’re seeing this writ large in Arizona right now, where rightwing conspiracy advocates were hired by Republicans in the state legislature to “audit” the November vote in an attempt to prove that Donald Trump actually won that states election.
While that sounds bad, wait until 2022 and 2024 when a couple dozen red states will have seized complete control of their election systems, like Republican politicians just did in Georgia.
They have cut election professionals and the Secretary of State out of the process entirely and handed to partisan Republicans the power to decide who actually won or lost the elections in the state, which votes get counted and which don’t, regardless of what the voters said overall.
These Republicans explicitly do not believe in democracy. They think it’s a quaint and outdated idea, but that they know a better way to run a country. Just let the “really smart” people make all the decisions and everything will work out just fine.
And how do you know who is “really smart?” Whoever is richest. Our culture constantly amplifies this message: the richest guy in the room is also the smartest. It’s the political version of Neo-Calvinism.
We find it throughout our media where our super-wealthy people are treated like rock stars and demigods, and it’s implicit in our legal system where wealthy criminals almost never go to jail.
Even when their crimes destroy the lives of thousands, like we saw during the the Bush crash of 2008, multimillionaires like Steve Mnuchin made off with huge piles of cash while tens of thousands of working-class Americans lost their homes and many lost their families and even their lives. As if to prove the rule, the one guy who did go to prison for financial fraud was Bernie Madoff – but he didn’t steal from average people, he stole from rich people. Now that is a serious crime.
Looking just at the most recent elections faced by House and Senate members who supported overturning the 2020 election, the Center for Media and Democracy found some mind-boggling statistics.
Josh Hawley and Rick Scott are arguably the two most serious contenders for president on the Republican side in 2024. Hawley received $41,169,601 from dark money groups leading up to his last election, according to the Center, and Rick Scott received $35,142,565.
This does not include money their official campaigns for the candidates themselves took in or spent; it’s just the largely invisible “dark money” spent to help them that we only learn about months after the election.
Rightwing billionaires, their report notes, put over $67 million into Kevin McCarthy’s Congressional Leadership Fund to support the 147 members of the House who voted against the 2020 presidential election results, and more than $40 million into Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund to support similarly-voting Republican senators.
They document how Senator Ted Cruz got well over $8 million, and even Colorado’s eccentric gun fetishist Lauren Boebert got $4,917,827.
All of this was made possible by right-wingers on the Supreme Court who blew up a whole series of good-government, anti-bribery laws Congress passed dating all the way back to 1907, with the ultimate knife in the back of democracy coming in 2010 with their Citizens United decision.
The top donor husband and wife who helped members of Congress who voted to overturn Joe Biden’s election kicked in $191.4 million to the dark-money groups supporting these politicians. Just behind them a single hedge fund CEO put in $59.8 million. Next was a guy who inherited a fortune from his father: he tossed in $50 million just support these authoritarians, followed by another financier at $46 million. The list goes on…
The Center documents how dozens of corporations also added in tens of millions of additional dollars to support those members of Congress who wanted to overthrow the election of 2020.
While the Center reports that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch tossed in $2 million, less than half of the $4.4 million Betsy DeVos put in, their network, Fox News, has done the really heavy lifting to support ending democracy in America.
Every night in prime time, multimillionaire hosts like Tucker Carlson promote the idea that white authoritarian rule is necessary to keep America from descending into chaos caused by dark-skinned immigrants and Black people, particularly if they’re allowed to vote.
While Ronald Reagan supported apartheid in South Africa, the modern conservative movement he birthed is now supporting it here in the United States.
We thought we dodged a bullet with the 2020 election. But Republicans in state after state are loading cannons as you’re reading this, and the very concept of democracy itself is in their bullseye.
Original post with hotlinks: HartmannReport.com
New Red State Evil Plot: Going Authoritarian & Ditching Democracy
Republicans in state after state are loading cannons as you’re reading this, and the very concept of democracy is the target. Will their scheme be completed by 2024?Americans thought January 6 was the peak of the effort to end democracy in America and replace it with strongman authoritarian rule. But January 6 was merely the tip of the iceberg.
And it’s not just about Donald Trump. This “iceberg” monster that threatens to sink the United States is about ending democracy altogether here and replacing it with a wealthy, white aristocratic oligarchy.
The less visible but largest part of that iceberg is in the states, and it’s huge.
Red state after red state is nakedly and openly flipping from democracy to a form of authoritarian oligarchy.
Authoritarian Republicans at the state level, in state after state, are criminalizing protest with such severe penalties that simply stepping off the sidewalk and into the street during a protest could land you 15 years in jail.
At the same time, they’re legalizing the murder of pro-democracy, anti-fascist protesters.
The man who killed Heather Heyer and wounded numerous others at the Charlottesville Nazi/Trump rally with his car, for example, could well now be found not-guilty if legislation that has already passed in one state and is pending in multiple others were to pass in Virginia.
These new laws say that any motorist who is trying to “flee a riot“ and injures or kills people in the process can be held harmless. It’s the protest/automobile equivalent of “stand your ground laws.“
Finally, and most alarming, these authoritarian Republicans are seizing control of the actual mechanism of voting.
We’re seeing this writ large in Arizona right now, where rightwing conspiracy advocates were hired by Republicans in the state legislature to “audit” the November vote in an attempt to prove that Donald Trump actually won that states election.
While that sounds bad, wait until 2022 and 2024 when a couple dozen red states will have seized complete control of their election systems, like Republican politicians just did in Georgia.
They have cut election professionals and the Secretary of State out of the process entirely and handed to partisan Republicans the power to decide who actually won or lost the elections in the state, which votes get counted and which don’t, regardless of what the voters said overall.
These Republicans explicitly do not believe in democracy. They think it’s a quaint and outdated idea, but that they know a better way to run a country. Just let the “really smart” people make all the decisions and everything will work out just fine.
And how do you know who is “really smart?” Whoever is richest. Our culture constantly amplifies this message: the richest guy in the room is also the smartest. It’s the political version of Neo-Calvinism.
We find it throughout our media where our super-wealthy people are treated like rock stars and demigods, and it’s implicit in our legal system where wealthy criminals almost never go to jail.
Even when their crimes destroy the lives of thousands, like we saw during the the Bush crash of 2008, multimillionaires like Steve Mnuchin made off with huge piles of cash while tens of thousands of working-class Americans lost their homes and many lost their families and even their lives. As if to prove the rule, the one guy who did go to prison for financial fraud was Bernie Madoff – but he didn’t steal from average people, he stole from rich people. Now that is a serious crime.
Looking just at the most recent elections faced by House and Senate members who supported overturning the 2020 election, the Center for Media and Democracy found some mind-boggling statistics.
Josh Hawley and Rick Scott are arguably the two most serious contenders for president on the Republican side in 2024. Hawley received $41,169,601 from dark money groups leading up to his last election, according to the Center, and Rick Scott received $35,142,565.
This does not include money their official campaigns for the candidates themselves took in or spent; it’s just the largely invisible “dark money” spent to help them that we only learn about months after the election.
Rightwing billionaires, their report notes, put over $67 million into Kevin McCarthy’s Congressional Leadership Fund to support the 147 members of the House who voted against the 2020 presidential election results, and more than $40 million into Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund to support similarly-voting Republican senators.
They document how Senator Ted Cruz got well over $8 million, and even Colorado’s eccentric gun fetishist Lauren Boebert got $4,917,827.
All of this was made possible by right-wingers on the Supreme Court who blew up a whole series of good-government, anti-bribery laws Congress passed dating all the way back to 1907, with the ultimate knife in the back of democracy coming in 2010 with their Citizens United decision.
The top donor husband and wife who helped members of Congress who voted to overturn Joe Biden’s election kicked in $191.4 million to the dark-money groups supporting these politicians. Just behind them a single hedge fund CEO put in $59.8 million. Next was a guy who inherited a fortune from his father: he tossed in $50 million just support these authoritarians, followed by another financier at $46 million. The list goes on…
The Center documents how dozens of corporations also added in tens of millions of additional dollars to support those members of Congress who wanted to overthrow the election of 2020.
While the Center reports that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch tossed in $2 million, less than half of the $4.4 million Betsy DeVos put in, their network, Fox News, has done the really heavy lifting to support ending democracy in America.
Every night in prime time, multimillionaire hosts like Tucker Carlson promote the idea that white authoritarian rule is necessary to keep America from descending into chaos caused by dark-skinned immigrants and Black people, particularly if they’re allowed to vote.
While Ronald Reagan supported apartheid in South Africa, the modern conservative movement he birthed is now supporting it here in the United States.
We thought we dodged a bullet with the 2020 election. But Republicans in state after state are loading cannons as you’re reading this, and the very concept of democracy itself is in their bullseye.
Original post with hotlinks: HartmannReport.com
April 24, 2021
Well, it’s started. The United States has reached the point, in many parts of the country, where there are more vaccines available then there are people willing to take them.
Most of this so-called “vaccine reluctance“ is driven by pure politics.
Donald Trump‘s visceral hatred of Joe Biden, who beat him like a drum in the last election, and the Republican party’s commitment to raw power over anything that may help Americans, have brought us this crisis.
If Trump, Fox and the GOP can convince the people who follow them that they shouldn’t get vaccines, they can prevent President Biden from getting this pandemic under control.
If they can prevent Biden from getting the disease under control, they also prevent him from getting the economy back in shape.
And - Bingo! - if they prevent him from getting the economy back in shape, Republicans see victories in the 2022 midterm elections and might even take back the White House in 2024.
This is their simple but brutal math, and they frankly don’t care who it kills. The more the better, in fact, because chaos hurts the (Democratic) party in power. After all, they’ve already shown us they’re willing to kill a half-million Americans just to try to win the last election.
And, as village idiot and Senator Ron Johnson said yesterday as he was discouraging general consideration of vaccine documentation, “Why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine, to the point when you better impose it, you’re going to shame people, you’re going to force them to carry a card to prove that they’ve been vaccinated so they can just stay in society. I’m getting highly suspicious of what’s happening here.”
Right. It’s just a public health emergency that’s killed a half-million Americans. No big deal for rich Republicans.
So it’s up to us to blow up their plan. And if enough of us take one small, simple step we may be able to pull it off. Here’s how:
I’m calling restaurants, bars, stores, and other places of business that I’ve patronized over the past couple of years. Taking it slow, just one or two a day. Casual.
My conversation goes something like this:
Me: “I see we’re getting close to the point where the economy can open back up. I’m so excited about coming back to your (restaurant, store)! I love your (mention dish or product so they know I’m a real customer)! I just wanted to make sure, first, that you’re requiring proof of vaccination before you let people in?”
Them: “We don’t have any specific policy about that, but you’re more than welcome to come. All of us who work here are vaccinated!”
Me: “Well, let me give you my name and phone number and you can call me if you decide to change your policy. For at least the next year, I’m only going to patronize businesses that require proof of vaccination to get in the door. Even though I’m vaccinated, I don’t want to be exposed to someone who’s not and who might be carrying around one of those weird variants.”
Them (usually sounding a bit rattled): “I’ll be sure to tell the manager that you called...”
This can work.
The primary imperative of every business is something called “differentiation.” When I taught marketing and ran an advertising agency in Atlanta, I’d always ask, “What makes you different from your competitors? What is it you’re offering that they aren’t or can’t? Simply put, ‘what is your unfair competitive advantage?’”
More often than not, the answer to that question became the focus of a great marketing campaign.
America is experiencing a mind-boggling amount of pent-up demand right now. People want to go out and eat, drink, celebrate, dance and buy things. But many, almost certainly a majority, want to do so safely.
So, if even a small but meaningful percentage of businesses decide it’s good marketing to cater exclusively to people who have taken the time and trouble to get vaccinated, it’ll create a social pressure that will begin to wear down those who people Republican politicians and Fox News have convinced that the virus is no big deal.
But big deal or no, they still want to get into the restaurant! And that could get us to the 75%-85% vaccinated herd immunity threshold we need for a safe country regardless of Trump’s or Johnson’s inane sputtering or Tucker’s smarmy “questions.”
Back in the 1980s a dear friend of mine, Tom Larsen, owned one of the finest high-end restaurants in Boston, The Pillar House. Every restaurant in town at that time had both smoking and no-smoking sections, but Tom was committed to serving extraordinary food in a clean environment where you could actually smell and taste the flavors his chefs so meticulously curated.
So in 1986 he banned all smoking at The Pillar House, even in the bar and the bathrooms: his was the first consequential restaurant in Boston, and one of the first in the nation, to do so.
I remember when he made the decision. We discussed it quite a bit, in fact. I was fully expecting he would lose business, but instead, as word spread, his business continue to grow!
The restaurant got enormous publicity (it was picked up by the AP nationwide!), their non-smoking customers became fanatically loyal, and the few hard-core smokers they lost were insignificant to their business.
As an added bonus, restaurants around the country, reading about Tom’s experience, started emulating him. Non-smoking restaurants became a thing in 1986, and within a few years became the norm. Even Boston’s Newton-Wellesley Hospital went smoke-free, the first hospital to do so in the area, citing Tom’s restaurant as an example.
There are a lot of us out here who don’t want to be exposed to GOP- and Fox News-maskholes and the viruses they may be carrying.
They’re this generation’s version of the selfish smokers in the 1980s, and we’re the health-concerned non-smokers. We would very much like safe spaces to enjoy shopping, dining or other activities without smoke or germs being blown on us by inconsiderate people.
For businesses looking for a competitive edge, this “let’s all live” marketing prescription is the opportunity of the decade!
And with just a few simple phone calls, you can help make it happen.
Original daily post with link to Pillar House timeline: HartmannReport.com
It's Time To Blow Up the Maskhole's Sick and Twisted Plan
For businesses wanting a competitive edge, a "let's all live" marketing strategy is the opportunity of the decade!Well, it’s started. The United States has reached the point, in many parts of the country, where there are more vaccines available then there are people willing to take them.
Most of this so-called “vaccine reluctance“ is driven by pure politics.
Donald Trump‘s visceral hatred of Joe Biden, who beat him like a drum in the last election, and the Republican party’s commitment to raw power over anything that may help Americans, have brought us this crisis.
If Trump, Fox and the GOP can convince the people who follow them that they shouldn’t get vaccines, they can prevent President Biden from getting this pandemic under control.
If they can prevent Biden from getting the disease under control, they also prevent him from getting the economy back in shape.
And - Bingo! - if they prevent him from getting the economy back in shape, Republicans see victories in the 2022 midterm elections and might even take back the White House in 2024.
This is their simple but brutal math, and they frankly don’t care who it kills. The more the better, in fact, because chaos hurts the (Democratic) party in power. After all, they’ve already shown us they’re willing to kill a half-million Americans just to try to win the last election.
And, as village idiot and Senator Ron Johnson said yesterday as he was discouraging general consideration of vaccine documentation, “Why is this big push to make sure everybody gets a vaccine, to the point when you better impose it, you’re going to shame people, you’re going to force them to carry a card to prove that they’ve been vaccinated so they can just stay in society. I’m getting highly suspicious of what’s happening here.”
Right. It’s just a public health emergency that’s killed a half-million Americans. No big deal for rich Republicans.
So it’s up to us to blow up their plan. And if enough of us take one small, simple step we may be able to pull it off. Here’s how:
I’m calling restaurants, bars, stores, and other places of business that I’ve patronized over the past couple of years. Taking it slow, just one or two a day. Casual.
My conversation goes something like this:
Me: “I see we’re getting close to the point where the economy can open back up. I’m so excited about coming back to your (restaurant, store)! I love your (mention dish or product so they know I’m a real customer)! I just wanted to make sure, first, that you’re requiring proof of vaccination before you let people in?”
Them: “We don’t have any specific policy about that, but you’re more than welcome to come. All of us who work here are vaccinated!”
Me: “Well, let me give you my name and phone number and you can call me if you decide to change your policy. For at least the next year, I’m only going to patronize businesses that require proof of vaccination to get in the door. Even though I’m vaccinated, I don’t want to be exposed to someone who’s not and who might be carrying around one of those weird variants.”
Them (usually sounding a bit rattled): “I’ll be sure to tell the manager that you called...”
This can work.
The primary imperative of every business is something called “differentiation.” When I taught marketing and ran an advertising agency in Atlanta, I’d always ask, “What makes you different from your competitors? What is it you’re offering that they aren’t or can’t? Simply put, ‘what is your unfair competitive advantage?’”
More often than not, the answer to that question became the focus of a great marketing campaign.
America is experiencing a mind-boggling amount of pent-up demand right now. People want to go out and eat, drink, celebrate, dance and buy things. But many, almost certainly a majority, want to do so safely.
So, if even a small but meaningful percentage of businesses decide it’s good marketing to cater exclusively to people who have taken the time and trouble to get vaccinated, it’ll create a social pressure that will begin to wear down those who people Republican politicians and Fox News have convinced that the virus is no big deal.
But big deal or no, they still want to get into the restaurant! And that could get us to the 75%-85% vaccinated herd immunity threshold we need for a safe country regardless of Trump’s or Johnson’s inane sputtering or Tucker’s smarmy “questions.”
Back in the 1980s a dear friend of mine, Tom Larsen, owned one of the finest high-end restaurants in Boston, The Pillar House. Every restaurant in town at that time had both smoking and no-smoking sections, but Tom was committed to serving extraordinary food in a clean environment where you could actually smell and taste the flavors his chefs so meticulously curated.
So in 1986 he banned all smoking at The Pillar House, even in the bar and the bathrooms: his was the first consequential restaurant in Boston, and one of the first in the nation, to do so.
I remember when he made the decision. We discussed it quite a bit, in fact. I was fully expecting he would lose business, but instead, as word spread, his business continue to grow!
The restaurant got enormous publicity (it was picked up by the AP nationwide!), their non-smoking customers became fanatically loyal, and the few hard-core smokers they lost were insignificant to their business.
As an added bonus, restaurants around the country, reading about Tom’s experience, started emulating him. Non-smoking restaurants became a thing in 1986, and within a few years became the norm. Even Boston’s Newton-Wellesley Hospital went smoke-free, the first hospital to do so in the area, citing Tom’s restaurant as an example.
There are a lot of us out here who don’t want to be exposed to GOP- and Fox News-maskholes and the viruses they may be carrying.
They’re this generation’s version of the selfish smokers in the 1980s, and we’re the health-concerned non-smokers. We would very much like safe spaces to enjoy shopping, dining or other activities without smoke or germs being blown on us by inconsiderate people.
For businesses looking for a competitive edge, this “let’s all live” marketing prescription is the opportunity of the decade!
And with just a few simple phone calls, you can help make it happen.
Original daily post with link to Pillar House timeline: HartmannReport.com
April 23, 2021
Yesterday I told you how the Republican Party is animated by one single force: greed.
And greed in modern society is all about money. Which is why money is how you take down the Republican Party.
To maintain their greed, the Republican Party has kept all kinds of good things from us, from healthcare to unionization to education to the ability to start a small business for yourself, your family and the future. All that has been eaten alive by their greed.
For Democrats to defund and thus defeat the Republican Party, all they have to do is put into place a few straightforward “good government” steps, all things that should happen in any case:
* End Red State welfare. Kentucky gets $2.41 from the federal government for every tax dollar they send to Washington DC, giving Mitch McConnell billions in blue-state tax money to shower on his voters and maintain his power. Most other Red States are similarly “taker” states. So let’s fight for a law limiting states to no more than $1.50 for every dollar they send to DC in tax revenues and they have to pay for everything else by taxing their own in-state wealthy people. Call it Welfare Reform!
* End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $600 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, about a trillion a year we give to Big Pharma (including forbidding Medicare from negotiating drug prices), and government subsidies to massive insurance companies like the “Medicare Advantage” scam that puts individual seniors and the entire Medicare system at risk.
* End corporate monopolies that fund the GOP. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses, which build local economies. From utilities to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working-class Americans to the tune of an average $5000 per-family per-year, and use some of that money to fund Republican politicians. (Breaking up monopolies is actually good for both the nation and the companies themselves: when Nixon & SCOTUS in 1974 initiated the breakup of AT&T into 7 regional companies and Lucent, completed in 1984, it actually increased shareholder value and led to an innovation explosion.)
* Bring back Eisenhower’s 91% top tax bracket to restore the middle class that votes Democratic. America’s strongest economy was 1950 to 1980, with a top tax bracket of 91% to 74%. We built highways, schools, hospitals, and put men on the moon. CEOs averaged only 30x the pay their employees took. Democrats ran virtually everything, even in what we now call Red States. Then the Supreme Court changed the rules of the game, money flooded the GOP in 1980, Reagan cut that top bracket to 25%, and the billionaires it produced continue to pour cash into the GOP.
* Impose Elizabeth Warren’s 2% tax on great fortunes and use it to fund healthcare and education for working-class voters. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year: it’s the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. That annual wealth/property tax pays for schools, libraries, police, fire and other essential infrastructure. Billionaires, like average homeowners, should pay their fair share of the cost of the commons through a similar annual tax on their money bins and other investments.
* Reverse Citizen’s United to end the GOP’s campaign money from corporations, SuperPACs and billionaires’ ability to skew our politics. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up, saying that money was speech. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one. (HR1 is a great start!)
Not only will these steps re-balance the money/power equation between Democrats and Republicans, they’ll be good for average working people and bring back a government that works for all Americans.
And, really, it’s just a case of “turnabout is fair play.”
It was forty years ago this Spring that Reagan and his buddies decided they’d strip the Democratic Party of most of its funding. And their audacious plan worked…until just the past few months.
In the 1970s, the Democratic Party was principally funded by working-class people through America’s labor unions, and the Republican Party got most of its money from big business and wealthy individuals.
America’s political system got a major shake up in 1976 and 1978: The US Supreme Court ruled in two cases those years that when billionaires or giant corporations owned politicians, that was no longer considered “corruption” or “bribery” as it had been since the founding of our republic. I lay this out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.
In those two decisions, Buckley and Bellotti, conservatives on the US Supreme Court ruled that when rich people or corporations showered their favorite politicians with cash, that money wasn’t actually “money.” Instead, the Court ruled, that cash was actually “speech,” and pouring cash down a politician’s throat was simply First Amendment-protected “free speech.”
Those two decisions, the second written by Lewis Powell (of “Powell Memo” fame) himself, unleashed a tsunami of corporate and billionaire cash that flowed into the GOP in the late 1970s and floated Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. (SCOTUS conservatives, over the loud, unanimous objections of the Court’s Democratic-nominated justices, doubled-down on these decisions with Citizens United in 2010.)
In the 1970s Democrats got most of their funding from working-class Americans via their labor unions, so the Party didn’t take much notice then of those two decisions that opened up politics for rich people and corporations. The unions were so awash in money that a few corrupt union bosses were even skimming some off the top.
So when Reagan became president, he set out to destroy the Democratic Party’s main source of funding: labor unions.
Following the example of his role model, Margaret Thatcher, who just two years earlier had destroyed the United Kingdom’s largest and most politically powerful labor union (the coal miners), he took down PATCO, the air traffic controller’s union, and did it in less than a week in 1981.
The following twelve years of the Reagan/Bush administration’s war on America’s middle class so completely gutted labor union membership that in 1992 Bill Clinton and Al Fromm had to reinvent the DLC to work as a funnel to bring corporate money into the Democratic Party.
Tragically, Reagan’s biggest victory in his anti-union effort was changing the very nature of the Democratic Party from FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society party into Bill Clinton’s corporate-friendly DLC/New Democrat party, burrowing deeply into bed with big banks, insurance companies, and the emerging tech industry.
But thanks to the tireless work of progressives both inside and outside government, and a general awakening of the American public to the dangerous scam the GOP has been running these past 40 years, the Democratic Party now has an opportunity to regain its soul and its prosperity.
Now is the most vital time possible to contact your local Democratic Party and volunteer to help out. Become a Precinct Committee-person and you can actually help choose primary candidates and write the Party’s platform.
Or you can can participate with Democratic Party-aligned groups like Fair Fight, Indivisible or Progressive Democrats of America, and take the fight all the way to the ballot box.
Republicans and their billionaire donors have devastated the middle class and torn America apart for 40 years now. Together we’ll stop them, and recover both our Party and our democratic republic.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
6 Steps to Restore Democracy & Defund the GOP
Reagan defunded the Democratic Party in 1981: And, really, it’s just a case of “turnabout is fair play.”Yesterday I told you how the Republican Party is animated by one single force: greed.
And greed in modern society is all about money. Which is why money is how you take down the Republican Party.
To maintain their greed, the Republican Party has kept all kinds of good things from us, from healthcare to unionization to education to the ability to start a small business for yourself, your family and the future. All that has been eaten alive by their greed.
For Democrats to defund and thus defeat the Republican Party, all they have to do is put into place a few straightforward “good government” steps, all things that should happen in any case:
* End Red State welfare. Kentucky gets $2.41 from the federal government for every tax dollar they send to Washington DC, giving Mitch McConnell billions in blue-state tax money to shower on his voters and maintain his power. Most other Red States are similarly “taker” states. So let’s fight for a law limiting states to no more than $1.50 for every dollar they send to DC in tax revenues and they have to pay for everything else by taxing their own in-state wealthy people. Call it Welfare Reform!
* End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $600 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, about a trillion a year we give to Big Pharma (including forbidding Medicare from negotiating drug prices), and government subsidies to massive insurance companies like the “Medicare Advantage” scam that puts individual seniors and the entire Medicare system at risk.
* End corporate monopolies that fund the GOP. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses, which build local economies. From utilities to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working-class Americans to the tune of an average $5000 per-family per-year, and use some of that money to fund Republican politicians. (Breaking up monopolies is actually good for both the nation and the companies themselves: when Nixon & SCOTUS in 1974 initiated the breakup of AT&T into 7 regional companies and Lucent, completed in 1984, it actually increased shareholder value and led to an innovation explosion.)
* Bring back Eisenhower’s 91% top tax bracket to restore the middle class that votes Democratic. America’s strongest economy was 1950 to 1980, with a top tax bracket of 91% to 74%. We built highways, schools, hospitals, and put men on the moon. CEOs averaged only 30x the pay their employees took. Democrats ran virtually everything, even in what we now call Red States. Then the Supreme Court changed the rules of the game, money flooded the GOP in 1980, Reagan cut that top bracket to 25%, and the billionaires it produced continue to pour cash into the GOP.
* Impose Elizabeth Warren’s 2% tax on great fortunes and use it to fund healthcare and education for working-class voters. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year: it’s the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. That annual wealth/property tax pays for schools, libraries, police, fire and other essential infrastructure. Billionaires, like average homeowners, should pay their fair share of the cost of the commons through a similar annual tax on their money bins and other investments.
* Reverse Citizen’s United to end the GOP’s campaign money from corporations, SuperPACs and billionaires’ ability to skew our politics. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up, saying that money was speech. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one. (HR1 is a great start!)
Not only will these steps re-balance the money/power equation between Democrats and Republicans, they’ll be good for average working people and bring back a government that works for all Americans.
And, really, it’s just a case of “turnabout is fair play.”
It was forty years ago this Spring that Reagan and his buddies decided they’d strip the Democratic Party of most of its funding. And their audacious plan worked…until just the past few months.
In the 1970s, the Democratic Party was principally funded by working-class people through America’s labor unions, and the Republican Party got most of its money from big business and wealthy individuals.
America’s political system got a major shake up in 1976 and 1978: The US Supreme Court ruled in two cases those years that when billionaires or giant corporations owned politicians, that was no longer considered “corruption” or “bribery” as it had been since the founding of our republic. I lay this out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.
In those two decisions, Buckley and Bellotti, conservatives on the US Supreme Court ruled that when rich people or corporations showered their favorite politicians with cash, that money wasn’t actually “money.” Instead, the Court ruled, that cash was actually “speech,” and pouring cash down a politician’s throat was simply First Amendment-protected “free speech.”
Those two decisions, the second written by Lewis Powell (of “Powell Memo” fame) himself, unleashed a tsunami of corporate and billionaire cash that flowed into the GOP in the late 1970s and floated Ronald Reagan into office in 1980. (SCOTUS conservatives, over the loud, unanimous objections of the Court’s Democratic-nominated justices, doubled-down on these decisions with Citizens United in 2010.)
In the 1970s Democrats got most of their funding from working-class Americans via their labor unions, so the Party didn’t take much notice then of those two decisions that opened up politics for rich people and corporations. The unions were so awash in money that a few corrupt union bosses were even skimming some off the top.
So when Reagan became president, he set out to destroy the Democratic Party’s main source of funding: labor unions.
Following the example of his role model, Margaret Thatcher, who just two years earlier had destroyed the United Kingdom’s largest and most politically powerful labor union (the coal miners), he took down PATCO, the air traffic controller’s union, and did it in less than a week in 1981.
The following twelve years of the Reagan/Bush administration’s war on America’s middle class so completely gutted labor union membership that in 1992 Bill Clinton and Al Fromm had to reinvent the DLC to work as a funnel to bring corporate money into the Democratic Party.
Tragically, Reagan’s biggest victory in his anti-union effort was changing the very nature of the Democratic Party from FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society party into Bill Clinton’s corporate-friendly DLC/New Democrat party, burrowing deeply into bed with big banks, insurance companies, and the emerging tech industry.
But thanks to the tireless work of progressives both inside and outside government, and a general awakening of the American public to the dangerous scam the GOP has been running these past 40 years, the Democratic Party now has an opportunity to regain its soul and its prosperity.
Now is the most vital time possible to contact your local Democratic Party and volunteer to help out. Become a Precinct Committee-person and you can actually help choose primary candidates and write the Party’s platform.
Or you can can participate with Democratic Party-aligned groups like Fair Fight, Indivisible or Progressive Democrats of America, and take the fight all the way to the ballot box.
Republicans and their billionaire donors have devastated the middle class and torn America apart for 40 years now. Together we’ll stop them, and recover both our Party and our democratic republic.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
April 22, 2021
Republican greed is why Americans can’t have nice things.
Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or even subsidized higher education. In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis, nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick, and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
But not in America. Republicans would never allow any of those things to happen.
It’s not about ideology. Republicans don’t hate Social Security and Medicare, for example, because they’re afraid that thos programs are going to somehow turn America into a communist country. They hate those programs because they’re paid for with tax dollars, and greedy Republicans hate to pay their fair share of taxes.
It’s not about racism, although it often appears that way. The reason Republicans work so hard to keep Black and Brown people down is because they subscribe to a weird economic theory that “requires” an underclass who do most of the hard work for very little money so rich Republicans, being part of the overclass, can reap the benefits and stuff the extra cash into their money bins.
If their use of racist language and iconography brings in a few more low-IQ white voters, that’s just icing on the cake. They can use the racist yahoos to get themselves reelected so giant corporations will continue to stuff their SuperPACs with lobbyist cash they can use for their own retirement.
It’s not about charity, although they love to say that the housing and healthcare needs of poor people should be taken care of through charity. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to maintain a healthy society.
It’s not about Christianity, although they’re constantly invoking Jesus for everything from pushing the death penalty on women who want to get an abortion to giving bigots the legal right to discriminate against gay and trans people. Jesus never once mentioned abortion and decried bigotry, but they regularly ignore and even flaunt His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and His warnings in Matthew 25. They protect multimillionaire evangelists’ tax-free status, and the preachers repay them by preaching politics from the pulpit.
It’s not about saving Americans from the pandemic. Trump used the Defense Production Act to force mostly Brown and Black meatpackers back to work, not to keep Americans safe. As long as the factories are humming and the stock market is rising, a few hundred thousand dead Americans are just collateral damage.
It’s not about conservatism. They’re not interested in slowly or “cautiously” improving society, or “conserving” anything other than the balances in their own checking accounts. They like to use the word “conservative,” but they’ve rendered it meaningless at best and code for “racist” at worst.
It’s not about making the world a better place. They deny climate change, deregulate industries that poison our air and water, and do everything they can to screw working people out of unions, good wages and decent benefits. They’re totally down with pesticides that are killing our pollinators while they poison our atmosphere with their carbon emissions, all just to make a buck.
It’s not about having a better-educated electorate or populace. They’ve spent decades trying to destroy our public education system that was, in the 1960s, the envy of the world. When they did away with free and low-cost college education during the Reagan years they kicked off almost $2 trillion worth of student debt which is preventing people from starting families, opening small businesses, or even buying their first house. But it sure is profitable for Republican bankers!
It isn’t about “culture.” They do a good-old-boy NASCAR/Duck Dynasty routine to bring in the rubes, but there’s no way Donald Trump would ever invite the average Republican voter with a giant flag and a pickup truck to any of his golf clubs, nor would Ted Cruz want to vacation with one of them or their families in Cancun.
It’s not about “gun violence.” As long as their investments in weapons manufacturers are profitable and the problem of gun violence is limited to poor- and working-class Americans, Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about “gun safety.” Althought they’re happy to use guns as a wedge issue to bring in male voters who are insecure about their own masculinity.
It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans. Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation. As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation. And when the spotlight gets shined on them, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working Brown people in jail but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. They don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper.
It’s not about America “first.” Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration, over 60,000 factories have left America, along with at least 5 million jobs. Donald Trump‘s rewrite of NAFTA even gives American companies a huge new tax break if they move factories from America to Mexico.
At the end of the day, all Republicans care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force.
It doesn’t matter how many Americans die, how many humans struggle in misery and poverty, how many children’s growth is stunted or are poisoned by industrial and mining waste being poured into our air and rivers.
As long as the money keeps rolling in and their billonnaire patron’s taxes remain absurdly low, that’s all Republicans care about and are willing to fight for.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
Republican Greed Now Dominates Americans' Lives
It doesn’t matter how many people die, struggle in poverty, or are poisoned, as long as the profits roll in and taxes are lowRepublican greed is why Americans can’t have nice things.
Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or even subsidized higher education. In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis, nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick, and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.
But not in America. Republicans would never allow any of those things to happen.
It’s not about ideology. Republicans don’t hate Social Security and Medicare, for example, because they’re afraid that thos programs are going to somehow turn America into a communist country. They hate those programs because they’re paid for with tax dollars, and greedy Republicans hate to pay their fair share of taxes.
It’s not about racism, although it often appears that way. The reason Republicans work so hard to keep Black and Brown people down is because they subscribe to a weird economic theory that “requires” an underclass who do most of the hard work for very little money so rich Republicans, being part of the overclass, can reap the benefits and stuff the extra cash into their money bins.
If their use of racist language and iconography brings in a few more low-IQ white voters, that’s just icing on the cake. They can use the racist yahoos to get themselves reelected so giant corporations will continue to stuff their SuperPACs with lobbyist cash they can use for their own retirement.
It’s not about charity, although they love to say that the housing and healthcare needs of poor people should be taken care of through charity. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to maintain a healthy society.
It’s not about Christianity, although they’re constantly invoking Jesus for everything from pushing the death penalty on women who want to get an abortion to giving bigots the legal right to discriminate against gay and trans people. Jesus never once mentioned abortion and decried bigotry, but they regularly ignore and even flaunt His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and His warnings in Matthew 25. They protect multimillionaire evangelists’ tax-free status, and the preachers repay them by preaching politics from the pulpit.
It’s not about saving Americans from the pandemic. Trump used the Defense Production Act to force mostly Brown and Black meatpackers back to work, not to keep Americans safe. As long as the factories are humming and the stock market is rising, a few hundred thousand dead Americans are just collateral damage.
It’s not about conservatism. They’re not interested in slowly or “cautiously” improving society, or “conserving” anything other than the balances in their own checking accounts. They like to use the word “conservative,” but they’ve rendered it meaningless at best and code for “racist” at worst.
It’s not about making the world a better place. They deny climate change, deregulate industries that poison our air and water, and do everything they can to screw working people out of unions, good wages and decent benefits. They’re totally down with pesticides that are killing our pollinators while they poison our atmosphere with their carbon emissions, all just to make a buck.
It’s not about having a better-educated electorate or populace. They’ve spent decades trying to destroy our public education system that was, in the 1960s, the envy of the world. When they did away with free and low-cost college education during the Reagan years they kicked off almost $2 trillion worth of student debt which is preventing people from starting families, opening small businesses, or even buying their first house. But it sure is profitable for Republican bankers!
It isn’t about “culture.” They do a good-old-boy NASCAR/Duck Dynasty routine to bring in the rubes, but there’s no way Donald Trump would ever invite the average Republican voter with a giant flag and a pickup truck to any of his golf clubs, nor would Ted Cruz want to vacation with one of them or their families in Cancun.
It’s not about “gun violence.” As long as their investments in weapons manufacturers are profitable and the problem of gun violence is limited to poor- and working-class Americans, Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about “gun safety.” Althought they’re happy to use guns as a wedge issue to bring in male voters who are insecure about their own masculinity.
It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans. Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation. As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation. And when the spotlight gets shined on them, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working Brown people in jail but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. They don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper.
It’s not about America “first.” Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration, over 60,000 factories have left America, along with at least 5 million jobs. Donald Trump‘s rewrite of NAFTA even gives American companies a huge new tax break if they move factories from America to Mexico.
At the end of the day, all Republicans care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force.
It doesn’t matter how many Americans die, how many humans struggle in misery and poverty, how many children’s growth is stunted or are poisoned by industrial and mining waste being poured into our air and rivers.
As long as the money keeps rolling in and their billonnaire patron’s taxes remain absurdly low, that’s all Republicans care about and are willing to fight for.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
April 20, 2021
Miller’s memo specified that the DC National Guard would be essentially neutered unless he gave the order, and he and other Trump loyalists weren’t answering the phone for hours during the attack.
But where’s the investigation? Where are the hearings? Who’s asking Miller who ordered him to do this and why he went along with it? What was the end game? Who else was involved?
It sure looks like we experienced an attempted coup d’état that only failed because of the integrity of a few Republican officials and Secretaries of State. It was a widespread and concerted effort to end the American Experiment.
Donald Trump and a group of his followers, it appears, tried to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States and install himself as a strongman dictator, ending the world’s oldest democracy.
But any time questions are asked about these details, about who participated at the higher levels, about what members of Congress might’ve been involved, the conversation gets changed. The discussion is shifted to Antifa, Maxine Waters or something altogether unrelated.
Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 election was terrible in and of itself. Like Hitler’s “Stabbed in the Back” Big Lie that Germany was on the verge of winning World War I until the Jews and socialists sold them out, Trump’s Lie formed the basis for the attack on the Capitol and multiple ongoing attacks on our democracy.
But a second Big Lie that is emerging now, that the attack of January 6th was either not an “actual” or “serious” attack, or that, if it was, it was done by Antifa and Black Lives Matter members, is just as destructive. Perhaps more so, because it discourages further investigation.
These two Big Lies have already spread widely across social media and the Internet. Multimillionaire commentators on Fox News are doing their best to establish these lies as part of the documentary record, as are other rightwing media outlets.
America mustn’t let them get away with it.
We need to know the truth, including uncomfortable truths that may involve collusion and participation by elected officials and government employees, should that be proven to be the case.
America allowed the Big Lie of the “Lost Cause” and “the War of Northern Aggression” to survive and fester for over a century and the result is that Americans are still dying — daily — because of the color of their skin.
That elected Republicans are blocking efforts to find the truth about this January 6, 2021 act of treason, while actively using Trump’s original November 2020 Big Lie to cut back voting rights nationwide, is both despicable and dangerous.
It must stop. Now.
The perpetrators and collaborators — including those who are and/or work for elected officials — must be publicly held to account.
If Republicans continue blocking serious investigations and these crimes are successfullly whitewashed, the next authoritarian attempt to destroy our republic may well succeed.
Original post with letter from Christopher Miller blocking DC Guard action at: HartmannReport.com
A New GOP "Big Lie" Plot is in the Works - America can't let them get away with it.
The 21st-century version of the Confederacy is fixing to repeat the Big Lie strategy of its 19th century forebearers. And this one goes beyond the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Now they’re trying to sanitize treason as well.
George Orwell famously pointed out that, “Those who control the past control the future,” and the GOP is furiously trying to rewrite the history of January 6th to hide their participation in a heinous crime and promote their authoritarian agenda for the future.
Big lies, when heavily and institutionally promoted over generations, have incredible persistence.
Back in the early 1980s, Louise and I moved with our three kids down to Georgia to start a business in suburban Atlanta. The place was growing like a weed and opportunity abounded; we got our little start-up company on the front page of The Wall Street Journal within the second year.
But what I remember most vividly about those years is the answer I got one night at dinner when I asked our kids what they learned in school that day.
“We learned about the War of Northern Aggression,” one said, explaining that the New York bankers were trying to rob people in the South and so the South had to fight back.
This is what happens when history is allowed to be re-written for over a century. And it’s happening again, today.
As Mike DeBonis and Jeremy Barr, et al, document at The Washington Post:
Instead of an attempt to overturn the election by radicalized Donald Trump supporters, it was a choreographed attack staged by antifa provocateurs. Rather than an armed insurrection, it was a good-natured protest spoiled by a few troublemakers.
And instead of a deadly event that put the lives of hundreds of lawmakers, police officers and others at risk, the riot was no big deal at all.
A legion of conservative activists, media personalities and elected officials are seeking to rewrite the story of what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, hoping to undermine the clear picture of the attack that has emerged...
Six weeks after the attack, some are taking advantage of fading memories and unanswered questions to portray the riot in a different, more benign light....
Democrats are trying to put together a commission to study what happened, and Republicans are fighting every effort.
When congressional committees controlled by Democrats try to look into the events of January 6, their Republican colleagues tie the proceedings up in bureaucratic knots.
Very little, right now, is getting done, while documents and other evidence are being destroyed, “lost” or “forgotten.” There’s even some doubt about whether all the pre-January 6th security video from the Capitol that may have shown legislators giving recon tours to insurgents still exists.
The new story, as told by Tucker Carlson, Ron Johnson and others is that it wasn’t all that big a deal when the Capitol was stormed, and it certainly wasn’t treason. Donald Trump even went so far as to say that his followers were “hugging and kissing” the Capitol Police officers.
A few hundred foot-soldiers have been arrested and are being prosecuted, but nobody has heard a peep about the meeting in Trump’s DC hotel the night of January 5 or any other meetings or actions that may imply organization and leadership.
Acting Secretary of Defense, Trump loyalist Christopher Miller, was installed right after Trump lost the election as part of a rapid general purge of senior leadership at the Pentagon.
Anticipating the January 6th attack to end American democracy, Miller issued a memo (reprinted below) on January 4 specifically forbidding the District of Columbia National Guard from:
being “issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.”
“to employ any riot control agents”
“To share equipment with law-enforcement agencies”
“To use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities.”
“To employ helicopters or any other air assets.”
“To conduct searches and seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law-enforcement activity.”
“To seek support from any non-DC National Guard units.”
Miller’s memo specified that the DC National Guard would be essentially neutered unless he gave the order, and he and other Trump loyalists weren’t answering the phone for hours during the attack.
But where’s the investigation? Where are the hearings? Who’s asking Miller who ordered him to do this and why he went along with it? What was the end game? Who else was involved?
It sure looks like we experienced an attempted coup d’état that only failed because of the integrity of a few Republican officials and Secretaries of State. It was a widespread and concerted effort to end the American Experiment.
Donald Trump and a group of his followers, it appears, tried to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States and install himself as a strongman dictator, ending the world’s oldest democracy.
But any time questions are asked about these details, about who participated at the higher levels, about what members of Congress might’ve been involved, the conversation gets changed. The discussion is shifted to Antifa, Maxine Waters or something altogether unrelated.
Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 election was terrible in and of itself. Like Hitler’s “Stabbed in the Back” Big Lie that Germany was on the verge of winning World War I until the Jews and socialists sold them out, Trump’s Lie formed the basis for the attack on the Capitol and multiple ongoing attacks on our democracy.
But a second Big Lie that is emerging now, that the attack of January 6th was either not an “actual” or “serious” attack, or that, if it was, it was done by Antifa and Black Lives Matter members, is just as destructive. Perhaps more so, because it discourages further investigation.
These two Big Lies have already spread widely across social media and the Internet. Multimillionaire commentators on Fox News are doing their best to establish these lies as part of the documentary record, as are other rightwing media outlets.
America mustn’t let them get away with it.
We need to know the truth, including uncomfortable truths that may involve collusion and participation by elected officials and government employees, should that be proven to be the case.
America allowed the Big Lie of the “Lost Cause” and “the War of Northern Aggression” to survive and fester for over a century and the result is that Americans are still dying — daily — because of the color of their skin.
That elected Republicans are blocking efforts to find the truth about this January 6, 2021 act of treason, while actively using Trump’s original November 2020 Big Lie to cut back voting rights nationwide, is both despicable and dangerous.
It must stop. Now.
The perpetrators and collaborators — including those who are and/or work for elected officials — must be publicly held to account.
If Republicans continue blocking serious investigations and these crimes are successfullly whitewashed, the next authoritarian attempt to destroy our republic may well succeed.
Original post with letter from Christopher Miller blocking DC Guard action at: HartmannReport.com
Profile Information
Name: Thom HartmannGender: Male
Hometown: Portland, OR
Home country: US
Current location: US
Member since: Mon Nov 6, 2006, 08:54 PM
Number of posts: 3,979
