thomhartmann
thomhartmann's JournalHow The Reagan Revolution Collapsed America & the Florida Condo
Thought y'all here on DU would appreciate this.The collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Florida, the deterioration of infrastructure all across America, and our failure to plan for or respond to the threat of climate change all have the same source: greed. And it’s killing us.
Prior to the 1980s, Americans understood the need to keep a healthy cash-flow going or set aside reserves to cover the future cost of maintaining things. We had a top personal federal income tax bracket on the morbidly rich of around 74% and an almost-50% top corporate income tax bracket for those corporations that were essentially money machines.
As a result, infrastructure dating all the way back to the transcontinental railroad system built during the administration of Abraham Lincoln were well-maintained and reliable. Roads, schools and hospitals were shiny-new and state-of-the-art; even the older buildings constructed during and before FDR‘s New Deal were well-maintained. And, although we hadn’t yet heard of the need to concern ourselves with climate change, our government was able to fund itself to deal with crises.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, for example, the US national debt stood at a mere $908 billion; we funded things with taxes and mostly maintained a necessary national debt so savers and federal and state agencies would have a safe place to park cash in treasuries.
And we understood that investing in America produced great returns on that investment. When World War II ended and our national debt was 119% of GDP (about where it is now), President Dwight Eisenhower borrowed even more money to build the interstate highway system, which produced such an explosion of economic activity that the added tax revenues paid down the national debt to 60% of GDP by the end of his presidency.
Similarly, the GI Bill that gave 7.8 million mostly young men free college and low-interest home loans proved a fabulous investment.
Since college graduates make so much more than people who only have a high-school education, and higher-income people pay higher tax rates, every $1 invested in the educational part of the GI Bill during its life from 1944 to 1956 produced an additional $7 dollars in tax revenue to our government over the lifetime of those now-well-educated veterans.
Condos have a slightly more checkered history, but it parallels the mentality of the “greed is good” Reagan Revolution. While the idea of condominiums goes back to the 19th century, the first modern condo built in America was Graystone Manor in Utah in 1960.
When a developer builds and then sells condo units, there are two parts to the selling price that buyers take into consideration: the sale price and the HOA (Home-Owners Association) fee. That fee covers maintenance and operation of the condo, from painting and landscaping to replacing carpeting to fixing leaky pipes, and is typically a few hundred dollars a month.
From a buyer’s point of view, the monthly HOA fee is mentally added to the monthly mortgage payment to determine how much they can afford to borrow to buy the condo. Thus, the lower the HOA fee, the higher the mortgage the buyer can afford and the higher the initial price the developer can charge — money that the developer walks away with.
Therefore, for most of the 80 years developers have been selling condos, they’ve ignored long-term maintenance costs when calculating HOA fees to keep them low, making the sale of the condos more profitable to the developer. And, for similar reasons, HOA boards are often reluctant to raise monthly fees to build a reserve for future major maintenance projects because it lowers their own resale values.
The problem comes 20, 30 or 40 years down the road when the condo needs a new roof or major repairs and there’s nothing in the reserves to pay for it. Which is why the residents of Champlain Towers South were, just in the past few months, hit with an $80,000-per-unit one-time assessment to pay for the structural deterioration the 2018 survey found.
The developer walks away with the initial cash, previous homeowners got a free ride, and people who bought-in during later years get hit with the costs of major repairs, particularly when HOA boards choose to run the condo with no consideration of the future like Republican’s have run the country since 1981.
Which is pretty much the same thing that Reaganomics brought us with the entire nation. The billionaires who owned Reagan didn’t want to continue paying a 74% top tax rate, so they got him and Congress to drop that top rate all the way down to 25%.
To deal with the loss of revenue, we essentially stopped maintaining the country while Reagan and the first President Bush subsidized the wealthy by more than tripling the national debt to $2.6 trillion in their 12 years.
Which is why today our rail system can’t support a fast train, our water systems are polluted and unreliable, our schools and bridges are collapsing, and our electric grid can’t handle a winter storm or summer heat in Texas.
Meanwhile, the billionaires of the fossil fuel industry have known for over 50 years that their product would produce a global climate emergency that would cost trillions (indeed, has already cost America trillions).
Instead of planning to shift to green power over time, though, they funded a multi-decade national campaign to lie about global warming so they could keep churning their profits, leaving future generations — and us, now — to deal with the costs and consequences, including millions of annual deaths worldwide.
Several states have changed their condo rules to either require (Florida has not) or “recommend” that developers write HOA rules that require a reserve fund for future major repairs, although enforcement is rare and these rules simply don’t apply for substantial long-term needs in most states. (Hopefully the Champlain Towers South experience will cause some states to wake up and change these laws and rules.)
Similarly, some states (almost exclusively Blue States) have raised state taxes enough over the years to be able to continue to repair and rebuild their states’ infrastructure, given that the federal government has largely abdicated that responsibility ever since 1981’s Reagan Revolution.
Red states, with their infamously low taxes, have become sacrifice zones when it comes to infrastructure and, ironically, will benefit the most from President Biden’s infrastructure proposals.
Looking forward, condo developers should be required to set HOA fees high enough to build long-term reserves, our nation and the world need a carbon tax on the fossil fuel industry, and federal and red-state governments have to raise taxes on wealthy people and corporations back to pre-1981 levels to cover improvements and long-term maintenance.
If we fail to reverse the Reagan Revolution and again plan/build for the future, this 40-year con by wealthy developers, fossil fuel companies, and morbidly rich billionaires who’d rather shoot themselves into space than pay their taxes will continue.
And more people will die.
(If you want to drill into links, the original post is at HartmannReport.com)
Trickle-Down Economics Isn't Even a New Con
America has to reinvent our understanding of economics after 40 years of living under a tax-cutting, austerity-imposing, Republican-promoted trickle-down Reaganomics scam and return to a Keynesian system that still works in those countries like Norway, New Zealand or Denmark that never adopted “austerity.”
The core idea of Reaganomics is that if we give huge tax cuts and multi-billion-dollar subsidies to billionaires and giant corporations, that will “incentivize” these “job creators” to expand the economy and raise prosperity all around for everybody.
In fact, all those giant corporations and billionaires have done is put all that cash in their money bins and use it to buy 400-foot yachts and rocket rides into outer space…while destroying unions and holding down wages on working-class people.
A recent study from the London School of Economics has now totally debunked the Reaganomics notion that tax-cuts for rich people incentivize them to “create jobs” or lead to economic growth. In fact, such tax cuts only serve one single purpose: to move more of a nation’s income and wealth from the bottom 99% up into the money bins of the morbidly rich. And they do nothing whatsoever for the overall economy.
To the contrary, Reaganomics has devastated America. As a result of Reagan/Bush/Trump tax cuts, notes former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, “Since the start of the pandemic, just 651 American billionaires have gained $1 trillion of wealth. With this windfall they could send a $3,000 check to every person in America and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic.”
Reich adds: “Yet at the same time, more than 20 million Americans are jobless, 8 million have fallen into poverty, 19 million are at risk of eviction and 26 million are going hungry.”
So, how did we get here, and have Republicans yet copped to this giant, 40-year-long hustle that’s still being taught in our colleges and universities by professors subsidized by rightwing billionaires?
Back in 1980 Repbulican candidate Ronald Reagan promoted trickle-down economics as a “new idea,” representing the latest, state-of-the-art thinking from billionaire-funded so-called “conservative” economists. At first, even Republican politicians recognized it as a con; in the 1980 primary, Reagan’s main opponent, patrician multimillionaire George HW Bush, called it a con job that he labeled “Voodoo Economics.”
Bush and actual economists then knew what any student of economic history knew: trickle-down was just a money-grab by Reagan, who was fronting for his patrons among the very richest Americans. And, since the Supreme Court had just (in 1976 and 1978) legalized political bribery by billionaires and corporations under the rubric of money being the same thing as “free speech” and therefore protected by the First Amendment, Reagan and his friends were all in.
But trickle-down wasn’t even a new con. Back in the 1890s it was called “Horse & Sparrow Economics,” the sales-pitch before the era of cars being that if you fed horses more oats than they could normally digest they’d drop all that undigested oat in their manure for the sparrows to pick at; rich people’s excesses would spill over to the average person. It not only didn’t work; it was blamed, in part, for the Panic of 1896.
Warren Harding revived Horse & Sparrow Economics in 1920 when he campaigned on dropping the then-91% top tax bracket down to 25%. He was elected and kept his promise, the result being the “Roaring 20s” when the rich got fabulously richer while working people saw their wages actually drop (leading to an explosion of unionization efforts by pissed-off workers that were violently suppressed by employers and police).
It all came to a startling and final end in 1929 with the Great Crash that set off what was then called the Republican Great Depression (the “Republican” part of that label largely wore off after the election of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in 1952). Republicans stopped talking about horses and sparrows around that time, but the theory never really died; Reagan simply reinvented it in 1980 as “Supply Side Economics,” aka trickle-down.
Back in 1896 and 1929 people didn’t need a detailed multi-decade, multi-country analysis of Horse & Sparrow to know it was bad news: the Great Panic and the Republican Great Depression pretty much convinced everybody.
But somehow — even after 4 economic crashes (the Reagan stock market crash of 1987, the Bush Great Recession of 1992, the Second Bush Great Recession of 2008 and the Trump Depression of 2020) and spreading poverty — most voters never managed to put together the cause-and-effect of trickle-down Reaganomics.
This most recent study of trickle-down is probably the most comprehensive effort ever made to figure out what happens when you radically cut taxes on the morbidly rich. The researchers used “data from 18 OECD countries covering the last fifty years to investigate the effects of major tax cuts for the rich on income inequality, economic growth, and unemployment.”
And when they compiled those 50 years of data over 18 countries that had engaged in what we call Reaganomics and most of them call “austerity” economics, it wasn’t even close to what Reagan and his billionaire buddies told us would happen.
“Our results show,” the researchers write, that “major tax cuts for the rich increase the top 1% share of pre-tax national income in the years following the reform (𝑡+1 to 𝑡+5). The magnitude of the effect is sizeable; on average, each major reform leads to a rise in top 1% share of pre-tax national income of 0.8 percentage points.”
So the rich got richer. But did these “job creators” use any little bit of that money to, well, create jobs? “No,” say the economists at the London School of Economics.
“The results also show that economic performance, as measured by real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate, is not significantly affected by major tax cuts for the rich. The estimated effects for these variables are statistically indistinguishable from zero…”
So what is the single largest result of a nation embracing Reaganomics trickle-down austerity tax-cut policies?
“Overall,” their study summarized, “our analysis finds strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment. Our results … suggest that lower taxes on the rich encourage high earners to bargain more forcefully to increase their own compensation, at the direct expense of those lower down the income distribution.”
Americans seem to have largely figured this out: last year, for example, Arizona voters approved a ballot measure (Prop 208) that raised taxes by 3.5% on wealthy people making more than $250,000 a year. It was designed to raise $940 million a year from those taxes that would all go to fund the state’s crisis-ridden public-school system.
But when working-class people are gutted and billionaires make more billions, the stability of democracy suffers — particularly in a nation like the USA where the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Citizens United.
Which explains why this year, when the Prop 208 tax increase on rich people was to take effect, the Republican-controlled, billionaire-funded Arizona legislature passed the largest tax cut for the rich in the state’s history.
Altogether, Arizona Republicans passed and Governor Ducey signed a $1.9 billion tax cut that, as the Prescott Valley News notes “mainly benefits the wealthy” to “shield high-earning taxpayers from the effects of a new 3.5% tax surcharge voters approved in November to boost education funding.”
Until we get money out of the body of our political system, any effort to pull these billionaire leeches off our backs will be somewhere between extremely difficult and futile.
The For The People Act goes a long way in this regard, which is why billionaire-funded groups like Freedomworks are working so hard to kill it. It explicitly requires transparency from so-called “dark money” donors and groups, an important first step toward restoring voter faith in our political system.
That’s also why no Republicans in the House voted for it and Republicans in the Senate have filibustered it. They don’t want the depth of how sold-out they are to become public.
It’s crucial Democrats change senate rules with their 50 votes and end the Senate filibuster so America can get this Act into law and solve our parasitic billionaire problem. And then fix the holes the GOP has bored into our tax system so billionaires pay more than the 1% to 3% most are paying (and giant corporations pay nothing) while average Americans pay an average 24.2%.
If we fail in this, our democracy will continue to crash and burn, the attacks on it funded by rightwing billionaires will increase, and more members of the working class in America will slide into poverty.
Vaccine Passports Could Save Us From Trump's Final Massacre
J. R. R. Tolkien wrote, “The burned hand teaches best. After that, advice about fire goes to the heart.” It’s a painful truth that people in red states, and red counties in blue and purple states, are about to learn.
Here comes Donald Trump’s Final Massacre.
While multimillionaire well-vaccinated Fox “News” hosts continue to sow doubt about masks and Covid vaccines to jack up the billions in revenue the channel brings in every year for the Murdoch family, the CEO of a hospital chain in Missouri is begging them to tell the truth.
“The Delta variant is in the Ozarks,” tweeted Steve Edwards, CEO of hospital chain Cox Health in Missouri. “We have been interviewed by NPR, CBS News, MSNBC, AP, Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, NYTimes but not @FoxNews.”
This is a crisis now for Missouri because the Delta variant of the Covid virus is not only far more contagious than previous strains, but also more deadly. As Heather Hollingsworth writing for the AP notes, vaccination rates are very, very low in that state with one county clocking in at 13% and most counties “well short of 40%.”
People in red counties across America are reporting on social media the same thing Louise and I saw when we visited a rural town in Oregon last weekend: nobody’s wearing masks or practicing social distancing. They believe rightwing media’s lies that Covid’s “just like the flu” or “vaccines are experimental” or “it’s all a Democrat hoax.” They’re following Trump’s notion that masks make men look “weak.”
As a result of this, Eric Frederick, the chief administrative officer of Mercy Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, tells the AP that they have been “inundated with COVID-19 patients as the variant first identified in India rips through the largely non-immunized community.”
And it’s not just hitting the elderly. “These patients are also younger,” Hollingsworth writes, “than earlier in the pandemic — 60% to 65% of those in the ICU over the weekend at Mercy were under 40, according to Frederick, who noted that younger adults are much less likely to be vaccinated — and some are pregnant.”
When the Covid virus first showed up in the United States in January of last year, then-president Donald Trump quietly told reporter Bob Woodward that it was both deadly and airborne.
"This is deadly stuff," Trump told Woodward on February 7th, 2020. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”
That’s not, of course, what Trump and his lackeys told the American people, as they set up the deaths of over 600,000 Americans with more to come this year. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward a month later. “I still like playing it down…”
It’s a mantra Trump carried on right through his last weeks in office when he got himself and his wife secretly vaccinated in the White House, and, according to research published by the Brookings Institution, killed at least 400,000 Americans (and sickened millions more) who could have avoided infection if they’d listened to doctors instead of Republicans and rightwing media.
But there was a method to Trump’s homicidal madness. He knew what every politician who’s ever run for president or studied the history of presidential elections knows: when the economy goes into the tank before an election, the incumbent always loses.
Just ask Herbert Hoover; it was over 20 years until Republican Eisenhower retook the White House, and 60 years after the Republican Great Depression before Republicans regained solid control of the House of Representatives for more than a single congressional cycle.
Trump’s strategy to keep the economy on track was straightforward: keep people shopping, working and playing so our production and consumption would keep the economy going throughout the election year. No matter how many people died, especially if they were Black.
After giving in to his science advisors for a few months in March and early April, he went right back to downplaying the virus and discouraging people from even wearing masks.
That turnaround came literally the week after the day, April 7th 2020, when the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and Fox all led their news with the news that Black people were disproportionately dying from Covid relative to white people.
Suddenly rightwing media was all over the idea we must spread the virus far and wide to achieve “herd immunity,” a move Trump and his people thought would largely spare Red state white people but decimate the Black community and Blue states as I documented here.
The virus beat Trump, of course; Joe Biden is now president and Democrats took control of the House and Senate, but the echo of that murderous political strategy is still killing Americans.
And with the Delta variant, which kills unvaccinated people of all ages but only rarely causes illness in people who are fully vaccinated, Covid is about to plunge Trump’s devotees into a world of hurt.
As Cox Health CEO Edwards pleaded in his tweet: “Fox is the most popular cable news in our area - you can help educate on Delta, vaccines and can save lives @TuckerCarlson.”
While Red states generally ignore the threat, Blue states are doing everything they can to get ready for the onslaught of the Delta variant: New York and California are rolling out digital vaccination certificates people can show on their smartphones to get into restaurants and sports/entertainment events.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, knowing which way the political winds are blown by my colleagues on rightwing talk radio and Fox, went out of his way to say they’re not passports.
“I want to make this crystal clear before folks run with it,” Newsom told the press. “It’s become so politicized — almost everything in the state, nation — that there’s no mandates, no requirement, no passports in that respect.”
But vaccine passports are what will save us, particularly since the Delta variant has already spawned a new variant of its own, Delta Plus, that’s “more transmissible, more easily binds to human cells, and is potentially more resistant to antibody therapy” than even the deadly Delta variant itself.
This is why more than half of Americans surveyed want vaccine passports now, as do many business owners. When it’s impossible to know if the person sitting next to you on a plane or in a restaurant is vaccinated or a Trump-humper who’s trusting in Jesus or hydroxychloraquine, many people are still reluctant to dine out, vacation, or go shopping the way we did before the pandemic.
Which hurts what is now Joe Biden‘s economy — which is exactly what Republicans want. But they are playing with fire.
Particularly given how deadly the Delta variant is, and how often it can even create “breakthrough infections” in fully vaccinated people when they’re heavily exposed to the virus. As Boston’s NBC affiliate Channel 10 TV noted in a recent headline, because of the Delta variant “Nearly 4,000 Breakthrough COVID Infections Have Now Been Reported in Mass.” (That’s a drop in the bucket, and most don’t get very sick, but still…)
The original and early variants of the Covid virus required repeated or sustained exposure to become infected; the new Delta Plus variant can apparently be caught by simply walking past an infected person. A single case in an airport limo driver in Australia shows how it works, reports today’s The Washington Post:
“Video footage shows the limo driver infecting strangers at a shopping mall and in a cafe through only fleeting contact, which scientists say proves it is possible to catch the virus simply from sharing the same airspace as an infected person.”
The Post article adds, “The cluster began last week with an airport limousine driver and has grown to 36 cases…”
As the BBC reported this week:
“India’s health ministry says studies showed that the so-called Delta Plus variant — also known as AY.1 — spreads more easily, binds more easily to lung cells and is potentially resistant to monoclonal antibody therapy, a potent intravenous infusion of antibodies to neutralise the virus.”
And Delta and Delta Plus are just the June varieties; there are almost certainly more contagious and deadly varieties to come as evolution continues to work its magic on the virus.
The next few months will hopefully become a “Great Awakening” in America relative to the politicized lies that Trump, Fox and rightwing media have been spewing for over a year about the dangers of Covid. And that will lead to a new wave of mask-wearing and vaccinations.
If not, it’ll be the “Great Dying” for Trump followers and Fox viewers.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
The Demise of Local Entrepreneurialism is the Death of the American Dream
Entrepreneurialism is what builds vibrant local economies and a strong middle class, but ever since major changes in the enforcement of anti-trust laws as part of the Reagan Revolution in the 1980s, entrepreneurialism has been dying. The Biden administration now has a chance to fix this!
For most of the history of our nation – and even the centuries before the American Revolution – one dimension of “the American Dream” was to start a small local business like a cleaners, clothing store, hotel, restaurant, hardware store, theater, gift store, travel agency, etc., and then not only run it for the rest of your life but be able to pass it along to your children and grandchildren.
These companies generally paid well and, in part (along with unions in larger businesses) created the American middle class.
Today, instead, the few entrepreneurs left follow a very different business model: start a company and build it as fast as you can so you can sell it to a corporate giant before they squash you like a bug. This is an entirely new thing in American history.
I’ve been an entrepreneur my entire life. My dad (who worked in a locally-owned Tool & Die shop) had an entrepreneurial dream: he and his best friend, Jerry Miller, started a vitamin company they called Millhart Laboratories. I remember as a little kid sitting in our basement filling vitamin bottles from giant bags of big brown pills.
Dad and Jerry lost their shirts on that business, but I learned a lot. I started my first business 10 years later when I was 17, a TV/stereo repair shop in the back of a Head Shop in East Lansing across the street from MSU. Within a few years I employed five people and had a thriving business, but then made the typical beginners’ mistake of trying to grow too fast and killed the business.
Since then I’ve started 9 other businesses, and four of them did quite well. This is a common entrepreneur’s story; most serial entrepreneurs have had at least as many failures as successes.
But entrepreneurs today are struggling like never before in our nation’s history, and that’s a very dangerous thing for our communities and our economy.
Today’s landscape is dotted with low-wage big chains and boarded-up small towns; it was once local and vibrant. Prior to the Reagan Revolution, you could see that vibrancy in every town in America.
Small businesses, being close to their community and employees, almost universally pay better, have better benefits, and a better relationship with their employees and customers. They’re not just in the local community; they’re part of it.
Local entrepreneurs don’t become morbidly rich but they do well and their companies becomes part of the wealth of the community as they pay their property taxes, business taxes and engage in the entire local economic ecosystem.
When Louise and I owned an advertising agency in Atlanta, our employees formed a baseball team and competed against other small, local companies. Our herbal tea company employees in Michigan back in the early 1970s formed their own union, and eventually took over the company when we sold it to them (as we later did with the advertising agency) and retired to New Hampshire. Life was good for all, unlike the poor wage slaves at Amazon warehouses.
This was once the norm in America.
The first four years of the 1960s saw a brand new TV show — first in black & white and then in color — starring Martin Milner and George Maharis. The two guys drove their sports-car on the nation’s only coast-to-coast highway, Route 66, every week, stopping in small towns and mixing it up with the locals.
In the trailer for the classic DVD set of the show, Maharis asks Milner, “How many guys do you know who have knocked around as much as we have, and still made it pay?”
“Oh, we sure make it pay,” Milner replies. “Almost lynched in Gareth, drowned in Grand Isle, and beat up in New Orleans…”
I was nine years old when the show hit the air, and still remember being fascinated by the geographic, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the towns they visited.
Every town was unique and was generally identified by the names of the local businesses, which often provided a job for a few days for Tod and Buz as they explored our country.
Today, you could parachute out of an airplane from a few miles up, land in any city in America, and be totally unable to figure out where you are.
Instead of the “Peoria Diner,” it’s Olive Garden or Ruby Tuesdays. Instead of the “Lansing Hotel” it’s Marriott. Instead of local stores named after local families, it’s Walmart or Amazon that’s providing the goods Americans want.
But with the giant chains workers become cogs in a multinational machine, losing their humanity and individuality. And these corporate giants have also spent the past 40 years strip-mining the wealth from our towns and neighborhoods.
One of the reasons small towns are dying all across America is because of this death of local retail entrepreneurialism. In the pre-Reagan days you’d go downtown and visit the Armchair Bookstore, Jacobson‘s clothing store, and the Schneiderman Brothers corner drugstore to do your shopping.
Each being a locally-owned business, they would deposit the money from their sales that day in the locally-owned bank. The bank, in turn, would loan some of that money out to newer, smaller businesses, as well as local folks who wanted to buy a home.
A dollar spent in a community like that could circulate for months before it left town, producing multiple dollars in local value, economically enriching the community and everybody in it.
A major part of the Reagan revolution was establishing new rules for our economy that allowed giant, multi-state and multinational companies to come into local communities and wipe out their local businesses.
The rationalizations and details of how they pulled this off are fascinating and, if you’re interested in the deep dive, I wrote an entire book about it: The Hidden History of American Monopolies.
In summary, though, the big change now is that at the end of the business day the manager of the local Walmart or other multinational chain store, gas station, restaurant or hotel simply pushes a button and all the money from all the customers in that local community is immediately transferred from the local town and off to Walmart headquarters in Arkansas, etc..
Outside of a few paltry wages, none of that money stays in the local community any more: giant interstate chains like this act like a massive vacuum cleaner system sucking up cash from towns all across America and depositing it in the bank accounts of distant, giant corporations.
In many cases these massive companies don’t even pay property taxes because they promised “jobs” to the local community to get 10- or 20-year tax abatements and often even free land.
While the wealth of the morbidly rich Walton family has bloated to around $250 billion, towns all across America are now left as dead, dry husks. During the time of Walmart’s greatest expansion, in the 90s and early 2000s, it was estimated around 100 small, local businesses would go out of business for every big-box retailer that opened their doors.
And it’s not just Walmart, of course. Restaurants, hotels, fast food joints, drugstores, furniture stores, groceries, banks, clothiers, furniture stores, gift shops, jewelers, pharmacists, toy stores, and even the local hospital have all been replaced by giant chains.
None of them circulate money in local communities; all of them extract massive amounts of cash and transfer it every night to their far-away corporate headquarters for eventual distribution to overpaid executives and fat-cat shareholders.
Like giant suckers from an alien, octopus-like spaceship, when you see a national chain in your local neighborhood know that they are extracting wealth from you and your community that will never return.
One of the most ironic aspects of this is the impact it has had on politics. Republicans have relentlessly promoted this business aspect of Reaganomics which, in turn, has blighted rural and small-town America. Poverty in these areas has exploded, leading to increased levels of crime, suicide, addiction and general insecurity.
Insecure people often look to authority figures to “save the day” for them, and that’s what the GOP has been selling since the era of Barry Goldwater. “We’re the business experts and tough guys; we’re on your side,” they lie as they brand themselves with hunting rifles, Country music and NASCAR.
So the very communities wiped out by Republican economic policies become the hottest of Red-state Republican hotbeds. As Thomas Frank famously said, it’s “What’s The Matter With Kansas.”
Now that Democrats control the White House and both branches of Congress, if we’re really going are to “Build Back Better” we can break this cycle of local economic devastation.
The Biden administration and Congress can now repudiate and discard the discredited economic ideas that Milton Friedman and Robert Bork sold to the GOP and Ronald Reagan and he, in turn, imposed on the American business landscape.
Vigorous use of the anti-trust legislation that Reagan formally and explicitly stopped enforcing in 1983 — and hasn’t been meaningfully enforced since then — can be brought back to the fore. It’s all still on the books!
Poor communities, from rural West Virginia to urban Chicago and Oakland, need investment in local businesses that will keep money circulating in the local economies. Breaking up the big monopolies and oligopolies is step one.
Entrepreneurialism could become possible and fashionable again, and America’s communities can begin a serious, long-term recovery to the vibrancy those of us around before the Reagan Revolution remember well and you can still watch today on reruns of Route 66.
Original post with links at HartmannReport.com
Can We Stop Psychopath-Driven Inequality From Making Society More Sick?
Inequality is literally killing us, both individually and as a society, and its two main drivers are monopolistic business behavior, and greedy CEOs and politicians. Both are a result of psychopaths taking over politics and business.
Decades ago, when I was doing international relief work, I visited a school for Aboriginal children way up northeast near Cairns, Australia in a little town called Lockhart River.
One of the teachers there, a white guy who’d grown up in Sydney and was my guide around the place, told me the story of an “amazing, life-changing” revelation he had the first week he was teaching at the school.
He was supervising after-school activities, and a large group of the kids formed into two teams and were playing soccer. The game’s score went back-and-forth, back-and-forth with the two teams, fairly evenly matched, taking turns with who was ahead.
“They played for about an hour,” he told me, as I recall. “And then they stopped. They said the game was over, and I couldn’t figure out why.”
The revelation for him came when they told him that, by their rules, the game was over when both teams had achieved the same number of points. When things were even.
This is how things were across much of humanity before the psychopaths took over.
Humans are wired for cooperation and empathy; these are among the highest values in societies the predate the Agricultural Revolution and in cultures today who still remember their roots in such ancient societies.
The advent of agriculture 7,000 years ago, however, produced seasonal bursts of food from harvests, often followed by long, hungry winters. This gave some people — the psychopaths — the ability to (as Daniel Quinn wrote so eloquently in his book Ishmael) “lock up the food.” It was the original sin of greed, the forbidden fruit of the garden, something that’s considered a crime or a mental illness in Older Cultures.
Those greedy few who controlled the food had the power of life and death over everybody else, eventually coming to be known as kings, robber barons and CEOs as humanity moved into the modern era.
Although humans are wired for empathy, collaboration and cooperation, there is a small percentage — most estimates run between .5% to 2% — of people among us who are psychopaths; these people rarely feel empathy and view cooperation as a sign of weakness rather than strength.
And, tragically, these psychopaths have mostly come to dominate the worlds of politics and business.
Most stunning, multiple studies show that as many as 20% of American CEOs are psychopaths, accounting for a brutal business culture and a winner-takes-all economy.
Depending on party affiliation, those numbers probably hold true in politics, as well; if psychopaths are over-represented in the Republican Party (Trump is the latest and most visible example), that would account for their brutal style of politics.
If psychopaths are under-represented in the Democratic Party, that would account for why Dems constantly want to compromise and work things out. Such behavior is, after all, the baseline norm for humans who are not psychopaths.
While psychopathic CEOs and politicians battling it out in their own realms may seem remote for the average person, the reality is their psychopathic, greedy behavior accounts for much of the massive inequality we see in the world today.
And that psychopath/greed-driven inequality is making us, as a society, sick.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Equality Trust in the UK have spent years documenting how the more unequal a society is the greater will be their rates of crime, mental illness, violence, homicide, suicide, drug addiction, obesity, unwanted pregnancy and a whole host of other medical, psychological and social ills.
On the other hand, the more egalitarian or equal a society is the less frequently these societal ills present themselves. They’ve shown this is true from country to country, and even did an extraordinary break-down state-by-state in the US showing the exact same effect.
And now we’re finding that just playing games that are based on psychopathic behavior like trying to wipe out your competitors and take all their assets triggers similar reactions in people to societal inequality itself. And some games are worse than others at this.
And the game that’s the worst is Monopoly.
Back in 1903 Lizzy Magie, a British feminist and socialist, patented the board game that we know today as Monopoly. She invented the game as a warning about the dangers of unrestrained, unregulated capitalism, although over the past hundred years that has been almost completely forgotten.
As Chris Melore reports, “Monopoly stands out as the most debated — and most forbidden — board game of all time. In a recent survey of 2,000 U.S. residents, 20 percent say that their game nights with friends or family members are often or always disrupted by competitive or unfriendly behavior.”
Perhaps the “good” news is that “only 11% of respondents said they witnessed a physical fight break out,” but Monopoly — a game that is based on the prime psychopathic value of taking everything for yourself and thus increasing inequality — seems to trigger the worst in us.
Nobody’s calling for a ban on the game of Monopoly, but as the Aboriginal kids taught their “westernized” teacher — and the extraordinary scientific research of the Equality Trust clearly shows — we will all be better off if we can reform our political and business cultures to be less greed-driven (psychopath-friendly) and more collaborative and fair (humanity-friendly).
Those psychopath-proofing reforms range from tackling actual business monopolies, to getting corporate and billionaire money out of politics, to strengthening our democracy by establishing an absolute right for all Americans to easily and comfortably vote like in other democracies (see: HR1).
It’s a big lift, but if we all work together we can still make it happen.
Grand Dragon of Today's Ku Klux Kaucus? Donald Trump.
Donald Trump dumped his blog because he has nothing to say that anyone wants to hear beyond one single message.
He’s not thinking deep thoughts about the economy, or the state of the nation’s infrastructure, or offering insights into the Middle East. There’s literally no philosophy Trump holds — other than one single idea — that truly matters to the vast majority of the Republicans who support him.
He’s not Richard Nixon, who could be actually thoughtful on foreign policy. He’s not Ronald Reagan, who completely bought into the idea of supply side economics. He’s not George W. Bush, who had a story to tell us about why it was so important to attack the second-most oil-rich country in the world and hand their natural resources over to Dick Cheney’s company.
The only thing Trump has to offer his followers is open and blatant racism, and that is the core and foundational base of his support.
This is not unique in our history, and it’s not even unique in recent, 20th century American history.
When Republicans took the White House in 1921 and held it for 12 years, their rise in power was paralleled by a rise in the visibility and influence of the Ku Klux Klan.
By 1926, 150,000 cheering white people lined miles of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC to watch 30,000 Klan members dressed in full, white-hooded Klan regalia.
As a reporter for the New York Herald wrote: “30,000 men and women, clad in the white robes and conical hoods of the Ku Klux Klan paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue today from the capitol to the treasury. It took nearly three and a half hours for the colorful procession to pass.”
The official membership of the Klan at that time was around 3 million; their support among white Americans however, was much vaster and deeper.
Starting in the 1960s, however, the Klan fell out of public fashion and white people drifted away from its membership, joining the Republican Party instead.
This was one goal of Richard Nixon’s 1968 “Southern Strategy,” implemented by his consultants Lee Atwater, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort as an outreach campaign to the “silent majority” of America’s white racists.
Thus, the Klan never really went away; they merely changed their brand. And the Grand Dragon of today’s Republican Klan? Donald Trump.
It’s appropriate they’re digging up the remains of Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest now, because Donald Trump has replaced him as their leader.
A few weeks ago, an Axios-Ipsos poll found that about half (48%) of all Republicans disagree with the assertion that “America is a racist country” with an ongoing racism problem, compared to only 4% of white Democrats who say the same thing. “No problem here,” say members of the GOP.
While 87% of white Democrats believe America needs to continue working to give Black Americans equal rights, only 19% of white Republicans agree.
Fully 60% of white Democrats think the protests over the police murder of George Floyd raised an important issue in America and had an overall positive impact, but only 8% of white Republicans agree.
When the #2 Republican in the US House of Representatives, Steve Scalise, ran for election in Louisiana saying that he was “David Duke without the baggage,” white people in Louisiana knew exactly what he was saying. He was the perfect guy for GOP leadership.
There’s a simple reason why Republicans have now introduced legislation into 47 states to make it harder for non-white people to vote: the Republican Party is today’s version of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.
Today’s GOP’s white male foot soldiers don’t care about foreign policy or the federal budget deficit or what tax rate corporations pay. They don’t give a rat’s ass about Keynesian versus Trickle Down economics, or whether the US government is doing well in the Space Race to Mars.
They just want to make sure that Black people and other racial and gender minorities — along with “their” white women — are kept under their thumbs.
In the years following the Civil War, the Klan was at the forefront of efforts to intimidate Black voters; soon Klan members in state legislatures were passing state laws presenting legal barriers to minority voting. The GOP is leading a similar charge today, recruiting 10,000 “poll watchers” to intimidate voters in communities of color and passing voter suppression laws that are as thinly-veiled as was the old “Recite the Constitution” trick.
History is quite literally repeating itself.
What’s at stake right now in American politics is the future of multiracial democracy. The Republican Party, almost entirely white, wants to “take America back” to the “glory days” of the 1920s when white people proudly displayed racist emblems and paraphernalia and Black people and other minorities “knew their place.”
The virtually all-white MAGA mob that attacked the capitol on January 6th drew disproportionately from counties in America where white populations are slipping, relative to minorities. They came from places where “white replacement anxiety” is the greatest, as documented by the New York Times.
The GOP’s multiple and competing armed-white-militia groups are simply today’s version of the old Klan “Night Riders” who wore hoods and waved crosses while chasing and shooting at Black people from horseback.
The Democratic Party is in denial. They’ve had all the evidence of this in front of them since 1968, and they continue to refer to the Republican Party as if it were the kind of legitimate political party seen in other advanced democracies. It is not; Richard Nixon reinvented it, and the Party never looked back.
Democrats and the media need to start dealing with Republicans the way they would deal with the Klan. The GOP truly has become the Ku Klux Kaucus.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
Is It Too Late For Democracy?
Republicans in the US Senate just filibustered a January 6th bipartisan commission, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer failed to take the opportunity to call for a vote on a rules change in the Senate to end the filibuster. That’s a disaster.
People think the January 6th insurrection against our republic was over that evening; the truth is that it never really stopped, and is now spreading across our nation like a virus that’s infected the GOP.
Let’s just speak the truth: the people who’ve taken over today’s Republican Party hate democracy. And now they’re doing everything they can to destroy democracy in the USA and replace it with a full-blown fascist oligarchy.
This is no longer Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party. Instead, it’s become the party of racists, fascists and oligarchs: the question is if it’s too late to stop them.
They kicked off the Reagan revolution with the Big Lie that the American government was, itself, the core cause of society’s problems rather than the cure for society’s problems. Reagan put down that marker in his first inaugural address on January 20, 1981.
Then they tweaked and changed and sometimes just ignored laws to allow an avalanche of anti-democratic big money to flow into their party from right wing billionaires, massive corporations and conservative foundations.
They sought to exploit democracy’s weaknesses by exacerbating racial tensions and shouting out encouragement, first in code and now explicitly, to our country’s white racists. As a result, white supremacist groups are erupting all over the country.
Every Republican administration since Reagan’s has made a practice of putting lobbyists and other special-interest advocates in the highest positions of power within government.
As Gillens and Paige documented so brilliantly in 2014, Republican obstructionism has been so successful since the beginning of the Reagan Revolution that the vast majority of laws passed over the past 30 years are not only not what the majority of Americans want, but they are what the majority of Americans explicitly don’t want.
As these researchers said, in academic-speak: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,”
Republicans have now introduced over 400 pieces of legislation in 47 states to make it more difficult for people to vote and, in most cases, to give Republican elected officials the ability to decide which ballots to count and which to throw out.
As President Biden said, “What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick.”
And now they’ve launched an attack on an almost “pure democracy” process available to the citizens of about half our states: the ballot initiative.Just this year, over 144 laws have been introduced in 32 states to make it harder for average citizens to get issues on the ballot.
Republicans watched as everything from medical marijuana to increases in the minimum wage were voted into place by citizens in Red states, and they are over it. Never again, they say, should average voters be able to get a law on the books through the ballot box.
That’s why, of those 144 bills to block ballot initiatives, 19 have already been signed into law by various Republican governors.
Democracy in America is being hacked to death by a thousand blows from dozens of different directions, all originating with the GOP and their billionaire and corporate owners.
And they’ve been so successful at selling it that when Republican voters were asked if “changes to voting rules” will set things up in America so more Republicans “will win once those changes are in place,” more than half of the Republican voters said they’d go along with it.
As my colleague David Sirota notes:
“But now, another Overton Window has shifted. Super Pac and dark money spending flooding elections are the norm, and voter suppression tactics and legislation are considered by many to be just another totally permissible aspect of the political competition.”
The bottom line is that Republicans have chosen to embrace a form of government generally referred to as oligarchy rather than democracy and this is extraordinarily dangerous for a major party in a democratic republic.
There are now sitting congressmen openly calling for armed rebellion against our country. A third of Republicans believe in Qanon conspiracy theories that Democrats drink the blood of children, a libel that has historically been used against Jews, while the most-Q GOP congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, pushes the idea that wearing masks to stop Covid is the same thing as Hitler’s Holocaust.
Meanwhile, Republicans are pretending to negotiate things to run out the clock, and a small handful of Democrats are playing along.
They are playing with a fire that could burn down our nation, and Democrats must get control of the Senate now and nuke the filibuster so they can pass the laws that will protect our democracy, like the For The People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that have already passed the House.
As Senator Bernie Sanders warns us, “The American people want action, not never-ending ‘negotiations’ and obstructionism… This is an unprecedented moment in American history. … Yes, the future of the country is at stake.”
If the Democrats — and Chuck Schumer — fail in this, democracy in this country won’t survive past 2025.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
The Ugly Truth: Republicans Want More Poverty & Crime
The Republican Party is running a huge scam right now, similar to the one they ran in 1992 when President George HW Bush was setting up phony cocaine busts across the street from the White House and running his infamous Willie Horton ad.
Here’s the essential formula:
Increase levels of inequality in the country to the point where poverty and homelessness are a crisis.
Do this with huge, trillion-dollar tax cuts for rich people so they get massively richer, while gutting social-safety-net programs and supports for working class people like unions.
Poverty and homelessness increase which produces an increase in crime, and that freaks out middle-class people — the majority of voters.
Then build your political identity and campaign around being “tough on crime” while completely ignoring the fact that the poverty you helped create is largely responsible for much of that crime.
Blame the poverty-driven crime, instead, on “welfare“ programs Democrats have put into place to try to soften the blow of the poverty caused by Republican policies.
Get elected, create more poverty; rinse, wash and repeat.
This is not a new idea. Around 170 A.D. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said, “Poverty is the mother of crime,” although he was actually trying to reduce both in the wake of others who’d made poverty and thus crime worse.
And then there’s inequality, which it turns out is at least as consequential as poverty as a driver of criminal behavior.
Years of research done by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Equality Trust in the UK found that as inequality goes up, so does crime — particularly violent crime.
As their research notes:
“Rates of violence are higher in more unequal societies. This finding holds up in many different contexts, we looked at via different methodologies and after controlling for other determinants of crime such as low income, unemployment, and teen birth rates.
“Small permanent decreases in inequality — such as reducing inequality from the level found in Spain to that in Canada – would reduce homicides by 20% and lead to a 23% long-term reduction in robberies.”
Inequality, it turns out, may be an even more effective driver of violent crime then poverty. And the United States today is the most unequal society in the developed world.
This week while taking a walk in Portland, my wife Louise was attacked by a homeless man, who threw a water bottle at her and chased her down the street. He was almost certainly mentally ill as well as poor; programs for the mentally ill were mostly nuked by Reagan and have never recovered.
And research from the Equality Trust shows that inequality is associated with mental illness; as societies become more unequal, mental illness increases. The data holds all over the world.
Nonetheless, the GOP continues to promote policies that increase inequality and thus increase violent crime and mental illness, while blaming it all on Democratic welfare programs.
And Republicans believe them. A 2014 Pew poll found that while 90% of Democrats want the government to do something about inequality only 45% of Republicans think anything should be done.
And now they’re all over the media being positively hysterical, wringing their hands, about a post-Covid bump in crime during a time when 8 million jobs have literally vanished from the American job market and will almost certainly not come back any day soon.
Republicans find this particularly easy to get away with because American media is mostly owned and run by very wealthy people and the “talent” we see on TV are almost exclusively, themselves, multimillionaires. Such folks are rarely comfortable talking about poverty and its relationship to inequality, although they’re fine discussing crime anytime the GOP brings it up.
The same is true of most Republican politicians, funded as they are by billionaires, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out last July.
"Republicans are all upset that I’m connecting the dots between poverty and crime," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. "I know most of them haven’t experienced or seen these issues first hand, but I have. This may be hard for them to admit, but poverty and crime are highly linked, both violent & nonviolent alike."
This blindness hits the entire economy. When Democrats work to lift people out of poverty, it lifts the entire economy. As Republicans work to cut taxes on rich people and spending on poor people, it whacks the economy.
Investment strategist Sam Stovall pointed out, in a USA Today article by Doug Stanglin, that “every Republican president since Chester A. Arthur (1881-85) had a recession during his administration.”
Stanglin notes that Clinton “averaged 3.7% [economic growth] over eight years,” while, “Of the post-World War II presidents, only Truman, at 4.8%, Kennedy at 5.2% and Johnson at 5.1% scored higher average growth rates. By contrast, Reagan averaged 3.5%, Carter 3.3%, Nixon 3.1%, Bush I and Ford 2.2% and Bush II 1.65%…”
Republicans, however, not only are not interested in discussing inequality or poverty and the relationship of both to violent crime, they even have a handy rejoinder to anybody who wants to talk about crime, particularly crime committed in minority neighborhoods.
For them, it’s not inequality or even poverty that leads to crime, particularly violent crime: it’s “character.” And “character,” more often than not, is simply a stand-in reference for “racial minorities” or, at best, “poor people.”
They know it like a mantra because they’ve been saying it for years. Poverty is just fine. Don’t worry about it. It’s not causing crime; you can just look at those folks and see their criminality. As my right-wing colleague talk-show host Dennis Prager asserts, “It is not material poverty that causes violent crime, but poor character.”
Trump’s administration even claimed to reverse the arrow of causation, arguing that poverty is caused by violence, and therefore we don’t need to give poor people money but, instead, we need to throw more cops at them. “But to break the cycle of poverty,” he said in March of 2017, “we must also break the cycle of violence.”
Of course, they’re wrong. Taking this out of the American political and social context altogether, a study published by the National Institute of Health (NIH) about the impact of poverty in China is instructive.
The study looked at two years of homicides across China and found that “poverty and low income levels” are “positively related to homicide rates.”
But don’t expect the Republicans to wake up any day soon. This is just science, after all. They will never, ever vote to raise taxes on the billionaires and corporations that own them. And they’ll never work to use tax money to reduce poverty and inequality in America. Crime, after all, helps them beat Democrats.
Nor do they want to restructure our society in a way that gives working people the power to demand higher wages and better working conditions (unions), thus reducing both poverty and inequality.
And you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll continue complaining about the crime that they’ve created, particularly in the election ads they’ll start running next year.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
Can America Rise Above Racism & Embrace a Higher Vision of a Common Humanity?
Today is the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
At the Founding of America we set two goals: A democratically-run nation and equality for all citizens. We’ve largely put into place the democracy part over the years; now we must make the “equality” part happen.
A white man busted for passing a bad $20 wouldn’t get murdered by the cops — in fact, a white person in America is safe doing pretty much everything else that Black people have been killed by cops for doing just in the past few years (playing, eating, driving, parking, sleeping, walking, standing, selling cigarettes, seeking help, etc.).
Which raises a question that’s both existential and practical: America set the example for democracy in the world; can we now set the example for racial justice and harmony?
Or will the possibility of that dream die if the GOP regains power in 2022 or 2024 and pushes America back into being an openly apartheid white-run ethnostate, as we were pre-1965? Will Republicans gain enough power to revert America back to their “Southern Strategy” 20th century roots?
President Ronald Reagan justified his defense of apartheid South Africa by pointed out that the country was “a democracy,” and even though Black people couldn’t participate in that democracy, it was still all good…just like in much of America at the time. This was the worldview of America just a generation or two ago.
Congress, in 1986, however, overrode Reagan’s veto of an act condemning South African apartheid. Bishop Desmond Tutu, after he won the Nobel prize in 1984 and on a visit to America, referred to Reagan’s policy of supporting apartheid as “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.”
Tutu was right and Reagan was wrong, and South Africa is now a multiracial democracy. But world and US history — in this regard — have moved with glacial slowness.
South Africa’s apartheid government fell in the years immediately after the end of Reagan’s presidency, and has had both successes and difficulties in building a multiracial society. The same is true of Cuba and, at various times, Malaysia.
But they’re still relatively small countries. Today the world’s greatest superpower, America, is on the verge of living out the ideal that our common humanity is more important that our ethnic, religious, racial or sectarian differences. Of fulfilling the second promise of the Declaration of Independence: that “all men are created equal.”
Nonetheless, it’s still an effort that’s going to require Americans of good will to pitch in to make work. And it has powerful opponents, from MAGA to dozens of countries that are actively defending and promoting racism in America and in cyberspace.
In the beginning, most all countries were ethnostates - countries made up of a single ethnicity. Every nation was what it was because of the genetics of the people who made it up. Nations had evolved out of cities, which had evolved out of racially homogeneous tribes.
Swedes looked like Swedes, Persians looked like Persians and when people did occasionally travel, or armies invaded other lands, you could identify who was who simply by looking at them. Languages and subtleties of appearance were part of the equation as well: Swedes and Italians were identifiably different, and the British, Germans and the French spoke different languages.
The United States was established as a white British-ancestry ethnostate, although our founding documents declared otherwise.
At a time when about half the 13 American colonies held Africans in brutal slavery and all were actively engaged in the largest genocide in history, slaughtering Native Americans, idealists among the Founders and Framers included language in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, that explicitly proclaimed this country was formed to protect the rights of “all.”
It was also the first national founding document in the history of the world to assert that the purpose of government was to make sure that “all [people]” had equal access to “the pursuit of happiness.”
While that’s what we said, it wasn’t what we did for the first two centuries.
The naturalization act of 1790 only allowed “white people” who had lived in this country two years to qualify for citizenship. In 1924 we began to allow immigration of non-whites as a result of the Johnson-Reed Act (which also created the Border Patrol), but at a rate that couldn’t exceed 2% of their ethnic population in this country as of the 1890 census.
It wasn’t until 1965, with a heavy push from Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, that Congress officially changed the law to make our immigration policy colorblind. Finally, the United States could claim to seriously and legally begin to live up to the ideal that all are “created equal” by explicitly rejecting racism in our nation.
That law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, is one that many Republicans and virtually the entire white supremacist movement in this country assert must be reversed, because it’s allowed people of color into America as immigrants.
The GOP/rightwing-media/racist argument is that domination by a single race or ethnicity is the “normal” state of humankind, and if white people are “replaced” by Blacks or Hispanics, that new majority will turn the tables and oppress and subjugate the newly-marginalized whites.
It’s just a modern retelling of how racism has dominated nations worldwide over the previous few centuries. Racist domination has a lot of history on its side — racial equality is an ongoing struggle for nations around the world — but in 1776 the idea that a kingdom was the only viable form of government also was “normal” and democracy was a struggle.
Nonetheless, we set it as a goal and we’ve been moving in that direction, slowly and painfully, with every generation since the Founding of the republic.
It’s been a long and torturous road, but, with a lot of help from legislation passed by President Johnson and now elevated again by the Democratic Party, America stands on the verge of becoming one of the first nations in the history of the world to not only proclaim, but actually live out, the idea that we are intentionally bound together by our common humanity, rather than a common immediate ancestry.
The pushback against this has been intense and violent, particularly since the Obama presidency, with the rise of multiple reactive white supremacist groups and the acknowledgment by the FBI that armed white supremacist groups now represent the greatest terror threat to America and Americans.
All the way back in 2008 Trump led the charge for America to cling to its racist roots with his “birther” charges against the legitimacy of President Obama and his assertion that immigrants from Mexico were mostly rapists and killers.
As Chauncey DeVega brilliantly explains:
The Age of Trump was and remains a type of cruel tutelage for the American people on the reality of political monsters and monstrous political movements. These truths cannot be wished away or made to disappear. These anti-democratic, antisocial and anti-human politics must be confronted and defeated.
Had Donald Trump prevailed in stealing the 2020 election, odds are he would’ve institutionalized his temporary racist immigration policies and America would be sliding rapidly back toward white supremacy as federal policy, while increasing the violent persecution of Americans who are not white, and purging the nation of non-white immigrants.
The last thing Trump and his Boys want is racial or religious harmony in America. They thrive on hate and division, which the billionaires and big corporations behind them also appreciate because it takes the focus off issues of economic justice and equality.
The urgency of this issue today is not exclusive to America.
Largely as a consequence of increased international trade and inexpensive travel, but also driven by increasing numbers of refugees across the world fleeing climate change and sectarian violence, numerous other countries have begun shedding their ancient trappings of racist ethnonationalism by taking in refugees who don’t look or pray like their own historic citizenry.
And, like America, countries including England, France, Germany and Sweden are experiencing widespread push-back and white-supremacist political and social crises.
Meanwhile, other nations are doubling down on ethnonationalism. China is actively segregating out and cracking down on their Turkman population of Uighurs, while Myanmar is slaughtering their Rohingya minority. Israel grants a sort of second-class status to their minority Arab-Israeli-citizen population, and holds millions of Palestinians in Gaza in what is often described as the world’s largest open-air prison camp.
Racial and religious minorities fare even more poorly in most other countries of the world; although its roots are ancient, this idea of a truly egalitarian nation that is legally and practically blind to race, religion or ethnicity is shockingly new on the international scene and very much still an experiment.
From 1965 to 2016, America followed the policy of rejecting ethnonationalism and explicitly working to become a truly multiracial, multi-religious society in which all persons are considered equal under the law.
The “browning of America” has been led by that 1965 immigration law and Reagan’s “legalizing” around 4 million Hispanic immigrants; today more than half of the children born in America and those entering the earliest grades of elementary school are non-white.
This is the main driver of white supremacist fears; people arrested for attacking our Capitol on January 6th mostly came from counties where white populations are decreasing relative to non-white populations.
For four years, Donald Trump and his white supremacist movement put that idea of increasing American diversity on hold and in some ways reversed it. But the Biden administration has returned to embracing the vision of America that was first stated by slaveholder and Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson, pushed hard by President John F Kennedy, and brought into actual, legal being by President Lyndon Johnson.
In a period of just two generations, American politics, business and media have gone from being largely whites-only to having an extraordinary diversity of names and faces.
Increasingly, it appears the white nationalists have lost their battle and, barring the 1930s-German-style ethnic-cleansing/genocide dreamed of by several white supremacist terrorist groups here, America will continue on the path to finally become, as Dr. Martin Luther King said, “a nation where [people] will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Can America lead the world again?
In 1776, we were the first nation to “declare” explicitly that “all men are created equal”; we were also the first nation to repudiate theocracy and kingdom as legitimate forms of government and elevate republican democracy to the peak of the political evolutionary spectrum.
Just the “democracy” part of those two promises was a huge experiment, and most of the world thought we were nuts. “The people” running a country instead of a king or queen? It seemed crazy.
But by the 1830s it seemed to be working and Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat, explored our country and wrote what became the world’s best selling book that decade: Democracy in America.
By the 1860s there were nearly a dozen full- or nearly-birthed democracies around the world; as we entered the Civil War they held their collective breath, many convinced that this “great experiment of democracy” was on the edge of failure.
But we made it through, albeit with considerable difficulty, and by the turn of the 21st century 123 of the 192 countries in the world called themselves democracies.
That first and primary idea birthed in America — that citizens can democratically govern themselves through a representative government with elections and respect for the rule of law — has not only gone worldwide but is well-established across the globe.
Which raises one of the most important questions of our era: can that second, concomitant idea declared at the start of our nation — that all people are created equal and entitled to equal rights, privileges and opportunities under law — also become a new international norm?
And, if this ideal of an egalitarian republic establishes itself across the world in future generations as firmly as democracy has in previous ones, and continues as an explicit goal of our nation, how should this guide our relations with other countries?
After all, the ideal of racial, religious and ethnic egalitarianism is built into the Charter of the United Nations and is regularly given lip-service by politicians across the world. We have allies in this effort.
Meanwhile, multiple democratic nations have slid backwards into the icy embrace of ethnonationalism. Victor Orban has made it the cornerstone of his party’s rule in Hungary, Modi is promoting a Hindu state in India, and Bolsonaro has all but declared war on indigenous people in Brazil; at least a dozen democracies are on the verge of failing into ethonationalism.
And, as noted earlier, white supremacist ethnonationalist movements are approaching levels of support in countries like France and Sweden where they represent the possibility of gaining governing power like our GOP did in 2016, making them a genuine threat to the movement of those nations toward fully egalitarian democracy.
This is one of the greatest political and philosophical issues of our day: can humans rise above racism and embrace the higher vision of a common humanity?
America and the European Union are the main testing grounds for this question today, although it also confronts Israel in a way that nation’s hard-rightwing will not be able to ignore much longer.
Most of the world remains stubbornly segregated by race, religion and/or national origin, leaving this very much an open question. But racial harmony in governance is also the next great hope for humankind.
Much like America giving the world democracy in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, our experience in this country today may well determine whether the world moves forward or backward in the all-so-human struggle for equality, dignity and peace.
We did Part 1 of our Declaration's proclamation in 1776, establishing a democracy, but never enacted Part 2 - establishing a government where our common humanity is embraced and racism is rejected.
Does America contain within ourselves the seeds of racial harmony? Can we do it now?
Original post: HartmannReport.com
Was Jan 6th Worse Than 9/11?
Are Trump-humping Republicans doing more damage to American democracy than bin Laden did on 9/11?
A 250 GB leak of memos from within the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI show they were tracking “Popcorn Day.”
This was, according to these documents, a plot by several of the many post-Klan white supremacist groups to rain hell down on America on January 19th — the day before Biden would have been inaugurated — if the GOP’s attempted overthrow of the US Government had not succeeded on January 6th.
As Jacob Shamsian writes at insider.com:
The plans, called "Operation Stormbreaker," involved targeting landmarks, government buildings, power plants, and other civic institutions in DC on January 19, the memos show.
All across America, if Operation Stormbreaker were pulled off by these white supremacist terrorists, gunfire and explosions would be going off like popcorn.
The goal was to reduce American citizens to such a level of terror that we’d beg for “strong man Trump” to stay in office beyond inaugural day on January 20th to deal with the crisis, cementing into place the end of our republic and the beginning of a strongman authoritarian fascistic oligarchy.
And if that didn’t work, they had a Plan C to blow up the Capitol during Biden’s State of the Union Address. As Jason Wilson notes for The Guardian:
Almost a month later, a bulletin reported that “an identified militia group member” in Texas was claiming that if their “operation failed at the US Capitol” there was a “back-up plan” involving the group “detonating bombs at the US Capitol during the State of the Union.”
Funded and supported by billionaire oligarchs in the US and abroad, this movement to turn America from a democratic republic into a white-supremacist ethnostate oligarchy fronted by the GOP has deep roots and a broad reach.
For centuries white cops have routinely gotten away with murdering unarmed Black people and other minorities. After 15 million people went into the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, white supremacist authoritarians within the GOP made common cause with murderous cops instead of working to clean up a corrupt system.
White male supremacists in Michigan nearly succeeded in kidnapping Governor Gretchen Whitmer so she could face a show trial and public execution.
They invaded and seized control of numerous state capitols as well as the US Capitol while police and National Guard forces were held in abeyance.
They’ve turned Facebook and other social media into recruiting tools for violent white supremacist activity, and are now reaching out to bring young people into their movement.
They’re spreading lies and doubts about Covid vaccine to prevent the Biden administration from getting the pandemic — and, thus, the economy — back under control. They’re even threatening businesses that are requiring masks to protect their employees.
As the Capitol Police report, members of Congress are wary of even returning to their districts during the upcoming break because of the intensity of the death threats: “This year alone, there has been a 107% increase in threats against Members compared to 2020.” And 2020 was no picnic, with Trump doing his best to stir up political violence leading to the election.
They’re passing laws in state after state to forbid the teaching of the actual history of what white supremacists did to Black people in this country over the past 400 years.
Almost the entire GOP is publicly lying about the events of January 6th and what led up to them, and promoting Trump’s Big Lie that Biden didn’t really win the election by 7 million votes.
They’re using that Big Lie to actively rig the 2024 election, passing laws in state after state to give the power to decide which votes get counted and which don’t to Republican officials and their shills instead of election professionals.
They’re actively closing polling places in communities of color.
If citizens in states don’t like any of this, Republican state legislatures have introduced 144 laws in 32 states to make it almost impossible to get a measure on a ballot that may overturn their voter suppression and election-rigging. These laws have already passed in Florida, Idaho and South Dakota.
They’ve packed the Supreme Court, using underhanded and antidemocratic practices including actual treason during time of war, and that Court now is both indebted to and supports the billionaire ownership of the GOP, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.
If they succeed in these efforts and Trump or a Trump-wannabee like Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton become president in 2024 (whether they win the election or not), it will almost certainly be the end of the American experiment, as I document in detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.
This is an actual plot by a group of billionaires and a major political party to destroy a pluralistic and democratic America that we’re watching play out in front of us in real time.
Which raises the question: What should be done?
Worse - far worse - than 9/11
This goes way beyond what Bin Laden and his boys had in mind for us on 9/11 and in the months afterward: as Bin Laden himself frequently proclaimed, they just wanted us to pull the US military out of Saudi Arabia and pay more for Saudi oil.
Back when President George HW Bush was looking for a strategy in 1991 to kick off his re-election the following year, he decided to follow in Reagan’s Grenada footsteps (which followed in Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands footsteps) and have a “small war, quickly won” to boost his popularity.
Iraq was an easy target, as Saddam was largely isolated from his neighbors politically (he was busy writing a series of romance novels), so after Bush gave Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait (which had once been part of Iraq and was stealing Iraqi oil by drilling slant-wells from Kuwaiti land into oil deposits under Iraq). Saddam took the bait, Bush got his 3-day war, and because our sanctions included blocking chlorine to purify public water supplies, over the next decade a half-million Iraqi children died from dysentery.
This backstory is the foundation of 9/11. To stage the bombing of Iraq, Bush needed a nearby air base and the Saudi’s loaned him قاعدة الأمير سلطان الجوية, also known as the Prince Sultan Air Base near the town of Al Kharj in the Saudi high desert.
After the 1991 war, the US soldiers stayed, which infuriated Saudi fundamentalists who consider the soil of the entire nation sacred. American men were drinking alcohol and watching porn, and American women were showing their elbows and knees and (gasp!) driving vehicles.
Between that and the sweetheart deals Saudi Arabia gave American oil companies on the price of crude, these fundamentalists were furious.
Their most outspoken member was Osama bin Laden, then living in Afghanistan where he had a penny-ante operation Reagan had earlier helped him set up to train Muslim fighters against the Soviets.
He went so far as to warn America that if we didn’t remove our “blasphemous” soldiers from “sacred” Saudi soil, and start paying an honest price for Saudi oil (bin Laden figured around $100/barrel, and it was then about a third of that), he would hit us hard. (To get some Arab street cred, he also demanded Israel withdraw from Palestinian territories, but nobody took that seriously, including his own people.)
As bin Laden himself told the world with his February 23, 1998 Fatwah:
The Arabian Peninsula has never — since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas — been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. … [F]or over seven years [since HW Bush’s Iraq invasion] the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
But bin Laden wasn’t trying to destroy American democracy on 9/11; he merely wanted US soldiers out of the Prince Sultan Air Base (George W. Bush quietly removed them in April, 2003 around the time he stopped looking for family-friend bin Laden), and he wanted the US to pay more for Saudi oil.
He got both outcomes, as well as Bush letting the bin Laden family fly out of the US with minimal oversight. Bush let bin Laden himself go hide out in Pakistan with his wives and video porn collection. It all worked out well for both of them and their families until Obama came along and killed bin Laden.
“Taking down democracy” instead of “a single act of violence”
Consider our response to 9/11.
We spent over a trillion dollars “enhancing” our domestic security and creating new spy and police agencies.
We appropriated Hitler’s favorite term, “Homeland,” to describe our new super-police agency that would have oversight over all others, even though the whole idea of America was that we were not an ethnic “homeland” for any particular race, sect or creed but were a democratic republic.
We unnecessarily declared war on two nations — none of whose citizens were involved in 9/11 (those were mostly Saudis) — killing over a million human beings in that region while killing and maiming tens of thousands of Americans.
We so empowered radical forces in Saudi Arabia and across the region that they funded and created ISIS, producing a living hell for more millions of human beings, and the Saudis felt free to reach out and murder an American-resident Washington Post reporter, Jamal Khashoggi.
In the process, Bush and Cheney added over $7 trillion (conservatively) to our national debt just for the war (plus an additional $5.6 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires).
We authorized and executed multiple congressional investigations and a Special 9/11 Commission to look into the event.
As a nation, we declared “Never again!” — and no politician from either major party would ever argue that 9/11 was just a “bad day” or “tourist event.”
So bin Laden and his Saudi buddies hurt us badly, but didn’t in their wildest dreams think they could turn America from a democratic republic into an autocratic oligarchy like Saudi Arabia or Turkey.
More dangerous threat to America than bin Laden
But the oligarchs who own the GOP don’t like or want anything resembling actual democracy in the United States — they know that if the will of the people is done, their taxes will go up and their companies will have to stop poisoning and ripping us off for profit.
So we’re treated to 147 Republicans voting to overturn the result of the 2020 election and keep Trump in office; to people like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton saying, “I was there, they were just amazing people;” to members of Congress like Rep. Clyde lying to rewrite history by saying it was like “a normal tourist visit.”
These people do far more damage to America than Osama bin Laden ever dreamed of. They want to end our 240 year long experiment with a democratic republic and replace our government with one run by bullies, autocrats and oligarchs.
America was attacked from overseas, both at Pearl Harbor and on 9/11, and we pulled together as a people and responded with overwhelming commitment and force.
Now, like in 1861, we’re being attacked by traitors within our own nation. And the GOP would prefer that we just, in the words of #3 House Republican Elise Stefanik, “Move on.”
And they’re expanding their damage to democracy in America. Phony “audits” to try to uncount the 2020 election are spreading from Arizona to other states, and with the “audits” they’re doing their best to foster cynicism about American elections.
Their goal is that cynicism about electoral democracy will be so widespread that in 2024, when Democrats complain about GOP theft of the election in the states where they’re pre-rigging the process, few will take it seriously.
But in response to 9/11 we transformed our way of life and our government, spent over $10 trillion, and woke every American up to the dangers of religious radicals willing to use violence to reach their goals.
At the very least, in response to January 6th we should be able to put into place a limp, bipartisan Commission to inform America as to what happened, on whose order, and why.
But America must go way beyond that, because this is so much worse than 9/11; instead of a one-off hit to America, what the GOP is doing now is an attack on the foundation of our republic: the democratic process itself.
White supremacy is a cancer that requires a “whole of society” response including government action. Politicians who use it, explicitly or implicitly, must become political pariahs.
And the politicians, corporations and billionaires who funded Trumpism and continue to support GOP efforts at outright sedition should face serious consequences, including expulsion from office and prison.
Original post at HartmannReport.com
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Name: Thom HartmannGender: Male
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