Thom Hartmann: What To Do When You No Longer Need Your Slaves?

[thomhartmann]

Slavery is alive and well in modern America.

The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann on RT TV & FSTV "live" 9pm and 11pm check www.thomhartmann.com/tv for local listings

[NYC_SKP]

1. While I watch this, I wonder what your thoughts are about this other DU Post:

Last edited Wed Aug 14, 2013, 04:31 PM - Edit history (1)

Which attempts to make a connection between slavery and the Second Amendment:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023442697

Some very good counterarguments are in that thread.

TIA.

Edit: fixed link.

[midnight]

5. Hi NYC_SKP-I'm not able to access the link.... Not sure if anyone

else is having trouble, but thought I would let you know...

[NYC_SKP]

7. Thanks, midnight!

I guess that "http" part is pretty important!

[NYC_SKP]

2. Very insightful. Not FDR, not Hoover, but Reagan's third way to deal with unempoyed.

Make money off them. Payday lenders and rent to own, and when they screw up send them to for-profit prisons.

Nicely tied together.

K/R

[fascisthunter]

10. concepts like these always come from the priviledged

people who have no clue how the majority on this planet live, work and die.

[99th_Monkey]

13. Oh, they have a clue alright ...

... they just don't give a rat's ass about anyone but them & theirs,
Bush's "haves & have-mores", hatching Bilderberg plots of "break-away"
trans-national corporate thuggery running amuck with greed, destroying
much of the planet in the process.

[Auggie]

3. How for-profit prisons are paying WAY UNDER minumum wage for prison labor ...

and because of for-profit prisons, why the number of incarcerated in America from 1980 to 2009 increased 700%!

K&R

[99th_Monkey]

4. This is one of Thom's most damning reports of late.

As usual, he nails it.

Do yourself a favor and watch the WHOLE segment, as it is
rather startling near the end, as some very ugly truths are
painstakingly revealed.

[midnight]

6. K&R

[heaven05]

8. shameful

knew about amerikkka and king profit. Reagan was one of the sleaziest 'leaders' we've ever had since 1968. No breakdown of racial demographics in this piece, I wonder why?

[Half-Century Man]

9. I could never understand how Ronnie...

...could look good to anyone. Ronald Reagan was a fairly stupid money grubbing idealist who only ability was to make the best personal use of pure happenstance occurrences.
When our well regulated economy was able to out perform the Soviet style communist economic system after 40 years. RR took credit where none existed. When RR took office in 1980, the soviet union was already on it's last legs. The thing that crushed the USSR's economy was a prolonged war in Afghanistan (we can relate). Just because you were there doesn't mean you did it. If after 7 and 1/2 months of marriage following a whirl wind romance; your wife gives birth to a baby; you can hope it's a preemie, but not take it as truth.

Ronnie in his infinite idiocy could not fine value in people himself. He had to rely on the pocket books of people to tell him how much worth a person had in the world. Which fits into the Hollywood version of the world. The studio heads controlled the money so what ever whim they had at that moment was met. The success of every movie making endeavor is how much did it make? Nothing else mattered. How rich? How famous? No matter how loathsome or slimy a person could be; the fame and the money forgave all.

After a life spent in the warped fantasy land; he could have been nothing but a predatory monster who knew how to look good on camera. He saw people below his self perceived station as disposable; some thing which, if you were lucky, you could make a profit on. He did his level best to enable other like-minded psychopaths to flourish and seize control.

His legacy is thirty plus years of the most harm done to the greatest number of people in American history.

Goddamn you Ronald Reagan.

[DAngelo136]

11. It's actually not hard to figure out

The United States had been buffeted by 2 great economic shocks; the OPEC embargo and the Vietnam War. When the OPEC countries put their politics behind their oil and raised the price of a barrel, that caused a world wide ripple among the industrialized nations, by exposing their vulnerability. The Europeans reacted by imposing controls and revamping their economies to become more efficient, the U.S. already in political turmoil with Watergate and the resignation of Richard Nixon and the ineffectual policies of the Ford "rump presidency" elected Jimmy Carter.
But already there had been some discrediting of Keynesian policies due to lingering stagflation. This was led by Milton Friedman, Fredrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. These alternative voices to Keynesian thought was funded by the right wing led by the Cato Institute aided and abetted by the Hoover Institute as well. All that was needed was an opportunity for them to take power and to implement their neo libertarian policies. The right wing of the Republican Party, had been defeated after the '68 election but rather than go out, they built an infrastructure and purged the eastern establishment liberal Republicans from the party over time. You no longer saw the Rockefellers, Romneys or Javits, you started seeing Cheneys, Hatchs and Helms becoming more prominent within the party.
As this was going on, Carter was being slowly hung out to dry by the mainstream media, who was already conservative but was slowly being corporatized. Take a look at the press treated Carter's so called "malaise speech" and the actual text of the speech. The ideological center of the Republican party was being shifted from east to the west. But it took the Iran hostage crisis for the Reagan campaign to take hold. The day that Reagan took the lead was at this moment, in Nashua N.H. http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1017&pid=138815

What Nixon had built with the "Southern Strategy", Reagan took advantage of in Philadelphia, MS.

The rest is history.

[HumansAndResources]

12. Must Include the Evangelical Angle with Abortion

... tricking the Evangelicals into thinking they could "outlaw abortion" - an action that would require a Chinese-style reproductive-police-state and the complete abandonment of privacy.

That one issue split the Catholic vote, brought the Evangelicals to the polls in droves, and delivered the Civil-Rights-Hating Federal Justices that have whittled the Bill of Rights down to nothing.

In the end, we got the police state and zero-privacy all right. Meanwhile, the Billionaire Foundations that had pushed abortion from the beginning, under the Eugenics Banner, as the answer to children of "No use to society" (Margaret Sanger), got a big laugh at the religious-pawns who took their bait and switch.