thomhartmann
thomhartmann's JournalRepublicans Are Stealing the Commons
Louis DeJoy is trying to do nothing less than steal the Post Office from the American people and privatize it for a profit to himself and his buddies.
Democrats want to expand the commons, while Republicans want to steal it. It’s really that simple.
It’s why Democrats want to expand infrastructure (part of the commons) and Republicans don’t — the GOP want the commons of things like schools, rail lines, the Post Office and energy systems entirely billionaire- or corporate-owned.
Some, like libertarian Rand Paul, even think privatizing our fire departments and public roads — turning them all into fee-for-private-service and toll-roads — is the way to go, along with privatizing Medicare and Social Security.
“We the people” should, in their minds, own nothing but the army and the cops; everything else should be owned by and run for the profit of the elite class that funds them and their political campaigns.
It’s almost entirely absent from our political dialogue, but the issue of who owns the commons and how they’re to be used (and by whom) is at the core of almost all the major debates between Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, and even those advocating democracy versus those trying to install oligarchy.
The commons is the stuff we all use: The air and water, the public roads and schools, the police and fire departments, the airways that our planes fly over and through which we send radio and TV signals, outer space and our oceans.
The commons, in aggregate, are one of the major stores of the wealth of a nation.
The commons of the oil or minerals under public lands are owned by we the people, for example, but there are people and corporations that want to take those resources and convert them to their own private profit. (Alaska put an end to that, to the benefit of their citizens.)
One of the main reasons people throughout history have established governments is to protect and regulate the commons.
Which explains why some people and corporations are in a constant battle with government, and launch massive propaganda campaigns to say the government should be “smaller” and thus less able to protect the commons.
Whether it’s oil barons, or greedy ranchers who want to use public lands to graze their cows without paying a public fee that would help maintain and restore those lands, the commons are under continuous low-level assault by greed.
Similarly, polluters from mining companies to frackers to industrial operations increase their profits by dumping their poison into our commons, our air, soil and water, rather than paying the cost of cleaning up their own waste.
One of the biggest political battles of our day is defining the exact boundaries of the commons.
About half of all the electric and water utility companies in America are owned by the people, operated as part of the commons by state or local governments for the benefit of the citizens who use them.
The other half are run by private corporations, with a goal of generating profit out of those commons for a small number of shareholders and senior executives. The best example of the disaster of this is what happened to Texas’s privatized electric grid when cold weather hit; the companies had been protecting profits instead of their customers, and people died as a result.
History and contemporary studies show that when the commons are administered by the people who use them, particularly water and electric systems, they are better cared for and their benefits are provided to the people at a lower cost.
A great example of this is how Chattanooga, Tennessee has decided that Internet is part of the commons and the city is now providing extraordinarily high-quality, super-fast broadband to all its citizens at an astonishingly low-cost.
For generations, communities across America have engaged in this seesaw battle with forces that would privatize the commons; water and electricity are the examples most people would immediately recognize, but if cable companies use public rights-of-way to get their Internet or TV signal into your home, shouldn’t that be considered part of the commons?
Numerous communities have decided that the answer is yes, which is why when cable companies were first becoming a thing we required them to offer local cable-access television and to fund C-SPAN as a public good.
It’s also why we’ve regulated radio and television, requiring them to “program in the public interest” (to quote the old Fairness Doctrine), as the air through which radio waves travel is part of our commons.
Because one of the principal functions of government is to administer the commons, government itself — and our vote — is the most important of the commons.
Anybody who wants to exploit the commons for their own private profit would have to go through government, or corrupt government, in order to make that happen.
This is one of the main reasons that we have laws against bribery of public officials, and access to the commons for private exploitation is one of the most common ways private interests corrupt government. Witness Donald Trump putting a coal lobbyist in charge of the EPA and an oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands running the Interior Department.
Privatizing public lands, public schools, prisons and other obvious commons-related functions of government is a crime against Democracy.
A much bigger crime, however, is privatizing government itself, or “Shrinking it down to the size where you can drown it in the bathtub,” as K Street lobbyist Grover Norquist proposed some years ago on NPR.
In most developed countries, the healthcare system that is so essential to maintaining a robust and healthy populace is considered a core part of the commons. That notion is foundational to the proposal for Medicare For All here in America.
Similarly, opponents of privatizing our voting systems by turning them over to private, for-profit companies will tell you that privatizing the vote, what Thomas Paine referred to as the beating heart of democracy, is one of the ultimate crimes against the commons.
Depriving people access to the commons of the vote, the vehicle by which we choose government that administers all the rest of the commons, is another crime against both the commons and democracy.
There are currently over 400 pieces of Republican-sponsored legislation in various state legislatures that would make it more difficult for people to vote. Almost exclusively, these bills would reduce the ability of young people, elderly people, city-dwellers and minorities to vote, as the Republican Party sees these people as their political enemies.
Denying people access to the commons based on the color of their skin, in fact, is one of the oldest crimes against democracy that has been perpetrated throughout the history of America.
When we understand what the commons is, and have a collective consensus about what is and isn’t part of the commons, we can have an informed discussion about the proper role and size of government.
Until we frame our debates around the commons, it will continue to seem like most of our political debates are simply arguments about separate, discrete issues. In fact, most are about how the commons are controlled, protected and used, and to whose benefit.
We used to teach Civics in America; that mandate pretty much ended when Ronald Reagan put the anti-public-school advocate, Bill Bennett, in charge of the Education Department.
If our republic is to be successful, we must revive a robust discussion and debate about the commons.
Original Post: HartmannReport.com
The Election War of 2024 Is Being Fought Now
Republicans and their authoritarian supporters are working right now to steal the 2024 election and drop their 2020 treason into the memory hole. We can’t let them get away with it.
At the same time Democrats are trying to negotiate in “good faith” with Republicans about creating a “bipartisan commission” to investigate what happened on January 6th, Republicans are rigging elections in state after state and preparing for a total takeover of the American government. They’re even rehearsing ways to rewrite the Constitution.
This is war, but apparently only one side realizes it.
Democrats should forget about “bipartisanship” and either create a real investigative commission that has subpoena and other real powers or start talking about a Special Prosecutor or Independent Counsel with a grand jury that can do the job.
As former Cruz and DeMint communications director and speechwriter Amanda Carpenter writes over at The Bulwark in favor of a real investigative commission:
No one should be surprised that elected Republicans are not, as a class, eager to support the commission. For some, such as House Minority Leader McCarthy and the people who spoke at the January 6 rally, a vote for the commission is a vote to investigate themselves. If anything, their opposition is further evidence of the need for an independent investigation.
Republicans, of course, will block and filibuster any such thing — so many of them supported or engaged in treason on that day, they can’t afford it coming to the light of day with the 2022 election coming up — so breaking or changing the filibuster is step one.
Chuck Schumer needs to take control of his caucus and immediately either end the filibuster or replace it with a “Jimmy Stewart filibuster” (requiring 40 people on the floor and continuous talking followed by an unavoidable vote so actual and necessary legislation can be passed now).
If Schumer can’t do that, President Biden needs to intervene and help Democrats in the Senate replace him with somebody who can and will.
Once the filibuster is gone, the first order of business has to be taking apart, discrediting, and utterly shattering the democracy-destroying lies promulgated on a daily basis now by Trump and most of the rest of the Republican Party about our electoral process.
It’s absolutely necessary to reveal the Trump-following Republicans as the traitors and wannabe fascists they’ve become, and to stop their agenda of destroying democracy in this country.
That means forgetting about some namby-pamby January 6th Commission with a bunch of obstructionist Republicans on it — the very people who are trying to destroy our democracy — and immediately passing legislation to put into place a real investigative body, or a Special Prosecutor or Independent Counsel, to look into participation by Republican members of both Congress and the Trump administration in an attempted coup d’état takeover of our country.
Republicans will do everything they can to block any sort of real and actual investigation into the crimes they’ve been committing for the last few decades and, in particular, over the past five years. It’s guaranteed.
Chuck Schumer can’t let that happen: if he does, history will judge him as the Neville Chamberlain of our era.
We don’t need another whitewash like the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Commission: we need a Leon Jaworski, Archibald Cox, Ken Starr or Lawrence Walsh.
We need a Robert Mueller unencumbered by the restraints that Bill Barr put on him that prevented him from investigating Trump’s association with international and domestic organized crime and foreign governments.
There’s a reason why the 9/11 Commission never pointed out that Bush and Cheney were warned, in January 2001 during the presidential transition, by Clinton and Gore about Bin Laden but chose to do nothing with that information.
There’s a reason why the 9/11 Commission avoided seriously investigating and discussing Saudi Arabia‘s complicity, along with that of other wealthy and influential Saudi families associated with the Bush and other wealthy American families.
There’s a reason why the 9/11 Commission never investigated statements made by George W. Bush in 1999 that his father had “wasted” his own political capital by only having a three-day war in Iraq and that if W became president he’d attack Iraq again, only this time he’d make it a long enough war that he could use it to get himself reelected in 2004.
There’s a reason the 9/11 Commission never looked into how Cheney plundered the Defense Department on behalf of Halliburton, a company he’d run into near-bankruptcy when he was its CEO, with billions in no-bid contracts.
There’s a reason they didn’t even bother to look into Cheney’s ongoing stock holdings in the company, or investigate the many scandals surrounding Halliburton‘s shoddy workmanship that led to multiple American deaths.
And there’s a reason the 9/11 Commission completely ignored all the lies Cheney told about Saddam Hussein, and the pressure he put on our intelligence agencies to go along with his lies to get his war that would make him fabulously rich while leading to a million unnecessary human deaths.
The reason is that the Commission was put together with Republicans; it was a 50-50 effort. And they put a fence around that kind of information, forbidding investigations or testimony about events preceeding the attack.
This is not a debate over the minimum wage. This is about the survival of the American republic. In the larger sense, it’s about the survival of democracy across the world, the lives of billions of humans, and the survival of our biosphere.
Schumer needs to stop behaving like he’s negotiating a healthcare plan. This is war. And the only way to win a war is to fight it.
Original Post: HartmannReport.com
GOP Is Raising the Next Racist Generation of Right Wing Crackpots
Imagine if hard-core crazies like Marjorie Taylor Greene ran most of the school boards all across America. They could raise up an entire new generation of civics-clueless right-wing racist kids, and probably keep much of it well below the nation’s radar screen.
That’s the GOP’s current plan, and they’re gaining real traction in getting there. They’ve found their new 2021 “bigoted wedge issue” — crushing teachers and schools that want to teach the horrors of genocide and racism — and it’s cranking up their base just like gay marriage or “radical Islam” did a decade or two ago.
As a result, Americans who care about democracy and a genuinely egalitarian society that includes the diversity reflected by America’s citizenry need to get active. Now.
Back in 1954, the US Supreme Court in Brown v Board ordered the end of racial segregation in America’s public schools. The short-term result was a “massive resistance” explosion of public school districts actually shutting down, and the opening of hundreds of whites-only “Christian schools” and “academies” across the country.
When the IRS and then the Supreme Court ruled that some of these schools (and Bob Jones University) that were explicitly whites-only could no longer be tax-exempt, the so-called “Christian right” was birthed.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, their big freak out was “forced busing” of Black children into previously all-white schools.
There was a decade or so in there where they were hysterical about teaching evolution in our schools (60% of our schools still avoid the topic!), and positively foaming at the mouth about honest sex education. There were also a few years where they had major campaigns to ban gay people from even working in our schools.
The high point of this insanity was reached during the Reagan administration, when the president appointed Bill Bennett as Secretary of Education.
Bennett is probably most famous for having claimed that, “You could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” And then aggressively standing behind his quote in repeated media appearances.
Reagan and Bennett oversaw the gutting of Federal support for civics education, leading to the situation today where the group that runs national exams of eighth-graders across the country, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, determined in 2018 that only 24% of US students were “proficient in civics.” It’s gotten so bad that the Lincoln Project is launching a K-12 civics program of their own called the Franklin Project.
They’re doing that because they know that if you want to turn a democracy into an oligarchy and essentially hand the entire country over to a small group of super-rich right-wingers, keeping people stupid about how a democracy is supposed to work is a great starting point.
And it’s an issue that’s helping the GOP politically: Republicans are having a hard time attacking Joe Biden for his plans to undo 40 years of Reaganomics and put this country back to work rebuilding our infrastructure and pushing us into the 21st-century because people want that.
When we had a Black man in the White House, it was fairly easy for Republicans to demonize him, from Donald Trump’s birtherism rants to freak-outs about tan suits and “Third World Socialism” in Obamacare. He was, after all, a Black man in a position of power, and that was generally enough to keep the Republican base cranked up.
In the last few weeks they’ve tried to get their mojo back by pushing the idea that there’s still a Black person in charge of America, that being Vice President Kamala Harris.
One meme heavily promoted on rightwing radio and television is that Biden is feeble and incompetent and Harris is “pulling the strings” behind the scenes. When that didn’t get them the traction they wanted, they tried claiming that it was Susan Rice, another Black woman, who was our “shadow president.”
But no modern-day equivalent of the Tea Party movement emerged from all those efforts; it’s harder to get white Republicans to show up when there’s a very white guy in the White House and he’s doing things that will explicitly help millions of white people across the country. And he can hold a coherent news conference with a smile.
So this is their latest freak-out: teaching civics and history that might include the story of how badly white people have treated minorities over the last 400 years.
A couple of moderate Democratic and Republican senators put together what they thought was an uncontroversial piece of legislation that would undo Bill Bennett’s work and make available up to $1 billion a year in grants to states and local school districts to teach civics.
John Cornyn (R-TX) and Tom Cole (R-OK) were two of the Republican senators involved with several Democrats, and both are now starting to back away from the bill as they’re being hammered on right wing media. God forbid America’s children learn actual civics and thus understand how our government works.
Understanding civics and the history of race in this country has become such a live-wire for the GOP that they’re using the issue to take over school boards all across the country.
As Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times, an affluent Republican suburb was planning to teach Black history after a series of YouTube videos of their white students taunting Black students went viral, and local Republicans have now turned the Black history program into a central organizing issue.
As Goldberg notes, that “election drew three times the ordinary number of voters” and right-wing white people opposed to the so-called Cultural Competence Action Plan “dominated, winning two school board seats, two City Council seats and the mayor’s office by about 40 points in each race.”
In Orange County, whites-only history organizers are going nuts over the possibility that the Los Alamitos Unified School District could teach the actual racial history of the United States.
One of the opponents, in an open letter, said, “These courses are filled with hate for America and all America stands for,“ sputtering that the goal of the school is to develop a curriculum that “teaches children that America is based on white supremacy and that white people are racists, even if they don’t know it.”
In Oklahoma, Republican governor Kevin Stitt signed HB 1775 into law last week, a piece of legislation that “restricts the teaching of critical race theory in the state.” The bill explicitly bans “mandatory diversity training.”
A right wing oligarch-supported group called the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs pushed the bill saying, “Passage of House Bill 1775 sends a signal nationwide that Oklahomans will not tolerate efforts that force children to submit to the Marxist and racist theology of critical race theory…and impose psychological harm based only on an individual’s genetics.”
White Republicans across the country are now organizing at the level of school boards, county commissioners, and city councils.
Control of the curriculum in our schools, they know, is essential if they’re going to undo the “wokeness“ of the Millennial Generation and return to the 1950s-style Beaver Cleaver ignorance of America’s racial history that animates and sustains the white supremacy at the core of today’s Republican Party.
If you care that future generations of Americans both understand and undo some of the extraordinary damage that slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Doctrine of Discovery have wrought on this country, check into running for local office.
From dog-catcher to school boards to city council and mayoral races, multiple progressive groups offer tools to run for office, as does your local Democratic Party. Get active!
Original post: HartmannReport.com
Life Will Dramatically Change Under Brutal American Oligarchy
Want some racism, sexism, misogyny, blunt and angry nationalism, and good-old-fashioned corruption with your government?
We just had an example during the four years of the Trump presidency of how this could change everyday life in America, and the election to leadership of Trump acolyte Elise Stefanik shows how many in the Republican Party want to institutionalize it. It’s important to understand what it really means.
A lot of names have been bandied around to describe the form of government Donald Trump tried to impose on us during his administration. “Fascism” was used commonly, as were words like “little dictator,” and “cult of personality.”
But really what Donald Trump was proposing and trying to institute is a fairly common form of government, a variation of authoritarianism called oligarchy.
We are seeing it played out around the world in governments controlled by rich elites and run by authoritarians like Duterte, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, Orban, Modi, and Duda.
They seem like they are increasingly becoming one-man-rule governments, but authoritarianism is just the midpoint after oligarchs begin corrupting democratic governments and have not yet become full-blown fascist oligarchies.
Because they are rarely stable, these midpoint authoritarian governments usually are grown in, and rise up to seize control of democracies, as has happened several times in the Philippines, for example, where the biggest businesses are inextricably intertwined with the state, corruption is rampant, and the media, the courts and the legislature are all essentially under the control of the billionaire or oligarchic class.
Oligarchy is when the very rich rule a country largely for their own benefit. They typically bring along a charismatic but compliant leader at the top (often an oligarch himself, and if he doesn’t start out that way he certainly ends that way), and are supported at the bottom by “authoritarian followers” who feel insecure about their personal and economic prospects and want a “big daddy” who will soothe their anxieties, affirm their victimhood and outrage, and help them sleep at night.
Oligarchy is always the result of very wealthy people corrupting the political process, something the Founders thought they could control in America but that political philosopher Robert Michaels, with his “Iron Law of Oligarchy” in 1911, proposed was the inevitable result of every democracy that didn’t maintain strong guardrails to prevent the rich from rising up and corrupting the political process.
This corruption of politics is exactly what has happened in the United States since the late 1970s when the Supreme Court ruled (in their Buckley and Bellotti decisions in 1976/1978) that billionaires and corporations owning politicians was merely “First Amendment-protected free speech.” It brought us the Reagan Revolution.
They doubled down on this in 2010 with their Citizens United ruling, saying that if government prevented billionaires and giant corporations from overwhelming elections with their money and advertising, we were not just inhibiting their free speech.
The conservative justices on the Court invented a bizarre new doctrine to justify Citizens United, saying that average people were being disadvantaged when billionaires and corporations couldn’t pour unlimited money into the political process because if they were stifled we’d lose our “right to listen” to some of the most “important” and “well-informed” players in the economic and political game.
This “right to listen” is now, in our political process, the Supreme Court-created foundation of oligarchic control over the Republican Party, diminishing parts of the Democratic Party, and, increasingly, over that we refer to as “Red States.“
Authoritarian movements, as the Republican Party has recently become, typically have a few predictable hallmarks. They include:
Crushing the rights of women while glorifying a “macho” ethic and aesthetic
Crony capitalism, making a few rich and screwing everybody else
Crushing union efforts and any sort of demands by workers for fair pay or treatment
The legalization and widespread promulgation of the surveillance state while political elites routinely get away with crimes that would have put average people into prison for years
Repression of religious minorities and weaponization of religion as an agent of state power
The suppression — typically starting with the demonization — of the press; in later stages, outright murder of members of the press
The marginalization and demonization of minorities, particularly racial and gender-based minorities
Selective enforcement of laws so that individuals never know when they will become the target of state violence (example: how America polices Black people)
Seizure of the courts so that selectively enforced laws and regulations are used to maintain the power of the oligarchs and assuage the insecurities of their followers
A huge gap between the rich and poor (often accompanied by an explosion of homelessness), maintained and used by the oligarch class to provide victims their followers can feel superior to
The racialization of powerlessness and poverty
A brutal “grassroots” response to those who object to selective poverty, typically leading to the marginalization or even outright assassination of movement leaders (like Dr. Martin Luther King)
A false form of nationalism that glorifies a mythical past, explicitly covers up past crimes and failings, and positions the now-oligarch-controlled country as the pinnacle of political evolution
The corruption of the political process, so that the agents of the oligarchs can ultimately decide who gets to vote and who doesn’t, and which votes get counted and which don’t
Countries typically begin the transition from democracy into oligarchy and sometimes even outright fascism when the oligarchs seize control of a large part of the political process, typically a major political party.
This has happened in the United States over the past 40 years under the rubric of the Reagan Revolution. The Republican Party is now entirely controlled by the oligarch class, who also have functional control over as many as half of the individual members of the Democratic Party.
Slowing down or even reversing America’s slide into oligarchy will require a number of things the Biden administration has put forward.
We must show that democratic government can actually still work, reducing the demand for a strongman “savior” like we saw with Trump, and the passage of the expansive American Rescue Plan was a good start.
If Biden can get both his American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan enacted, rebuilding our physical, human and intellectual infrastructure, it will take a lot of wind out of the sails of the authoritarian movement in this country.
By proposing HR1, the For The People Act, the Democratic Party has chosen to explicitly repudiate oligarchy as a form of government. It requires transparency from “big money” and meaningfully reduces its influence, as well as ending minority-rule schemes like gerrymandering while establishing baseline minimum standards for elections in America.
By holding democracy high as a primary value, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act guarantees and expands democracy itself in America, which can rapidly and effectively kneecap oligarchy.
The success or failure of these initiatives — all fiercely opposed by the GOP and the oligarchs who own that Party — will determine whether America again embraces democracy, or picks back up on Donald Trump‘s nearly-successful move to push America into a full-blown fascistic form of oligarchy.
The stakes are higher than they’ve been since the 1860s and the 1930s; this may be our last chance to rescue democracy in this country.
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If you’d like to do a deeper dive on these topics, I’ve written a series of small, quickly-read books breaking them down.
The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment describes that Amendment’s roots in the Southern Slave Patrols and how American policing grew out of that and is used today as a violent system of control against marginalized people.
The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America lays out how a corruptly-stacked Supreme Court is the principal instrument that brought us here.
The Hidden History of the War on Voting describes the processes through which oligarchs corrupted the Republican Party and the American political system.
The Hidden History of Monopolies describes how the oligarchic class, exploiting weaknesses within our political system, managed to seize control of virtually our entire economy, giving them massive political power.
The Hidden History of American Oligarchy reveals the two previous times in this country when we almost tipped over into oligarchy [the Civil War era and the attempts to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt] and exposes oligarch efforts to pull it off again today and how we can stop them.
And The Hidden History of American Healthcare shows how the most important and central function of government — maintaining the health and well-being of its people — has been co-opted and seized by a small group of “healthcare oligarchs” and how a Medicare For All system can overthrow much of their power and end their plunder of the American middle class.
All are available through your favorite bookseller.
Original post with links at: HartmannReport.com
The 2024 Treasonous Plot to Steal the Presidency Exposed, Yet Still Working
For America to survive as a democratic republic, we must restore the legal guardrails that keep psychopaths from the political process. And we must hold the known psychopaths accountable.The “election audit” in Arizona continues, with Republican hacks handling the ballots in ways that pretty clearly violate federal law — and now we’re learning there’s an open router connected to the auditing computers. It’s not just a scam — the FBI/DOJ is investigating it as an actual crime.
But that “audit” is all about massaging Donald Trump’s psychopathic ego, helping him with his Lost Cause of “proving” he “won” the 2020 election. We laugh because it’s not going to end up throwing Joe Biden out of the White House and re-installing Trump, as his followers on social media believe will happen sometime this summer.
But what about 2024?
Protect Democracy is a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports and monitors the democratic process in America and it’s counsel, Erica Newland, concluded that if the Republicans take the House and Senate in next year’s elections then no matter who the GOP candidate is in 2024, and no matter how much he or she loses the election by, that person will become president.
As Michelle Goldberg reported in a The New York Times article ominously titled How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election, Newland laid it out:
“It occurred to me,” she told her colleagues [earlier this year], “as I dug into the rules and watched what happened, that if the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, there’s no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect.”
Ari Berman and Nick Surgey lay out for Mother Jones exactly how a billionaire-funded group is actively working with Republicans across the country to rig the 2024 election in advance. They note:
In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
How is it it that criminality like that — openly working to rig or overturn elections, even in advance — has become “normal” and acceptable, rewarded behavior among legislators in the Republican Party? Where do these people come from?
It turns out there are a lot of psychopaths — career criminals who are high-functioning — who rise to the highest levels of power within big companies. A recent study presented at the 2016 annual meeting of the APS found that:
“…while one in 100 people in the general community and one in five people in the prison system are considered psychopathic, these traits are common in the upper echelons of the corporate world, with a prevalence of between 3% and 21%.”
And now they’re moving into politics. Over the last 40 years, competent professional criminals like Trump and some of the Arizona state senators running this “audit” scam — and their fellow psychopaths among some of the billionaires funding legislation being passed right now in states across the country to pre-rig the 2024 election — have increasingly moved out of the business world and into politics.
The FBI even has an extensive part of their website at fbi.gov dedicated to identifying and dealing with these high-functioning “invisible” psychopaths. “Possession of a sense of superiority and lack of empathy can enable them,” the FBI notes, “to boast about the brilliance of their latest fraud scheme.”
“Corporate psychopaths with exceptional verbal skills make crafty interviewees,” the FBI adds. They also can make crafty politicians.
We can thank the Supreme Court for the enthusiastic migration of psychopaths into politics. And for their seeming invisibility.
Most Americans, looking at all these “election integrity” laws and today’s purge of pro-democracy politicians like Liz Cheney within the GOP, don’t understand how a party could “suddenly” become so corrupt and blatantly criminal. Where did these people come from?
It turns out that there are, among us, a small number of individuals who are career criminals because they’re high-functioning psychopaths. They have literally spent their entire lives — from childhood through adulthood — skirting or outright breaking the law, and not only believe the law doesn’t apply to them, but actually delight in getting away with their crimes.
Because all of us have, at one time or another in our lives, broken a law or told lies, we tend to assume that these people are just like us “but got caught in that one unlucky moment,” like that time you drove home after a second glass of wine, or made up a lie to get out of work for a day.
But they’re not like you and me. There’s something fundamentally different about psychopaths. And the failure to recognize that goes to the core of the crisis within the Republican Party — which has become a magnet for such people — and our overall political system today.
Back when I was in my early 20s, I got a job as the manager of a GNC store in a mall in Okemos, Michigan. There was a test that I had to give to all job applicants to determine their “honesty.”
The test asked really weird questions, along the lines of:
One of your very best employees just came to you to return some money to the till, money that she had borrowed from the till because a few months back she needed it to help pay for an emergency medical procedure for her child. She has saved up to pay the money back, and is now trying to do so. What do you do?
Or: Your mother just called and told to you that she’s been shoplifting at the local store when her food stamps run out and your younger sister is really hungry. What do you do?
The test, from a national testing chain, went on with 20 or 30 similar questions. In almost every case, the only correct answer to the multiple choice test was, “call the police and send them to jail.”
I protested to my district manager, saying that I would’ve flunked the damn test, or would’ve had to lie to pass it. There’s no way I turn in my mother or call the police on an employee with a sick child.
My manager told me, “The only way to pass the ‘honesty test’ is to lie on it,” and added that it was actually designed that way. They want people to say that they will call the police even for the tiniest of crimes. I protested that I thought that was crazy, that we were requiring people to lie to pass an honesty test, and that made no sense at all to me.
What he explained gave me my first real-world insight into psychopaths: there are, he said, some people who really, genuinely, deeply are always untrustworthy at best, or criminal at worst. It’s how they’re wired.
Turns out there’s no test in the world that can tell if a person really and truly will or will not call the police on anyone. But the test does tell whether a person understands the difference between right and wrong. It’s a flag for psychopathy.
“I know it’s hard for you to realize or believe,” he said, as I recall, “but there are some people who literally don’t know or care what is right and what is wrong. And the people who don’t have that basic understanding, or don’t think the rules apply to them, are the ones most likely to steal from us or let their friends come shoplifting. The test helps identify such people.”
One of the big challenges the American media and our political system have with this era’s Republicans is that, like the people I was testing to try to filter out from our potential pool of employees, the GOP is now filled with and funded by actual career criminals with no deep understanding of, or respect for, right and wrong.
Donald Trump has been scamming, grifting and stealing his entire life, going all the way back to stealing his father’s money from his parents and his siblings. He’s a career criminal, as are many of his acolytes in Congress and politics and apparently some of the billionaires who fund his “movement.”
Witness the numerous members of Congress who’ve been busted or at least outed for everything from giving no bid contracts to their own companies (Cheney and Halliburton) to putting bricks of bribe cash into their freezers (Rep. Jefferson). Even Forbes magazine called Trump’s Commerce Secretary, billionaire Wilbur Ross, a professional “grifter” for all the scams he’s perpetrated in his career.
While fundamentally dishonest psychopaths have been a problem for our society and business community for centuries, it has particularly become a problem in our political world since 1976 and 1978, when the Supreme Court explicitly ruled that billionaires or corporations giving massive amounts of money to politicians and political parties is no longer considered bribery or corruption but, instead, is “free speech” protected by the First Amendment.
Never before in all of American history had bribing politicians been considered free-speech, until the Buckley v Valejo and First National Bank v Belotti Supreme Court decisions. In 2010, conservatives on the Court doubled down on these decisions and even expanded their scope with Citizens United, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.
The result of these SCOTUS decisions in the 1970s was an ocean of corporate and billionaire money flowing into politics, sweeping Ronald Reagan into the White House. It was the start of the rise of psychopaths within the GOP.
In the 40+ years since then, billionaire bribery of politicians has become the norm, and is now even institutionalized with national and state-based “policy networks,” PACs and SuperPACs, and dark money groups like the ones pushing anti-democracy legislation in state after state.
All this money now sloshing around in our political system has produced the result the dissenting Supreme Court justices worried about. It’s become a giant magnet that draws career criminals and psychopaths into politics, and then helps them become fabulously wealthy as they do the bidding of the corporations and rich people who fund their elections and careers.
It’s normalized the “revolving door” where people go into government positions, particularly in regulatory agencies, and make decisions that benefit giant corporations while drawing a modest government paycheck, only then to leave government and pick up multi-million-dollar-a-year jobs in the industries they were regulating.
The GOP has become the party of psychopaths and career criminals.
Today it would simply be the old Eisenhower/Nixon corrupt-but-not-terribly-criminal GOP if the Supreme Court, back in the 1970s, hadn’t struck down the “good government” laws that came out of the Nixon bribery scandals and older laws to keep money — and the psychopaths who accumulate huge piles of it — out of politics. Some of those laws, like the Tillman Act, dated all the way back to 1907.
Because of these Supreme Court decisions equating money with free speech, the Republican Party is now overrun with and funded by grifters, con artists and psychopathic career criminals.
And an easy way to see it is to simply look at the billionaire’s war-like response to HR1/SB1/The For The People Act, which ends much of politicians’ ability to engage in criminal behavior like accepting bribes or rigging elections. Psychopaths and megalomaniacs always fight against anything that will control or regulate their behavior.
For America to survive as a democratic republic, we must restore the legal guardrails that keep psychopaths from entering, controlling or buying our political process. And we must hold the obvious psychopaths and their enablers — the Former Guy and those in Congress who encouraged and continue to baldly lie about the January 6th insurrection attempt — to account.
To reduce the power of psychopaths in politics, we must pass the For The People Act or similar legislation that psychopath-proofs our political system. We must stop them from continuing their efforts to rig the 2024 election.
And we must prosecute the criminals involved with the past administration and within the current GOP who committed so many crimes during the past four years and continue to lie about January’s attempted treason.
Original post with links: HartmannReport.com
Is the "International Criminal Class" GOP Worth Saving?
Liz Cheney is wrong. The GOP is now so deeply embedded with the international criminal class that it’s probably not worth saving.
For 40 years the GOP has been a peripheral but important part of the international criminal class; Donald Trump pushed the Party fully into its embrace while trying to drag the entire country with him.
Now that Liz Cheney’s rebellion has spilled it all out in the open, and their lies, deceptions and criminality are irrefutable, some people, particularly in the media, seem shocked. They shouldn’t be.
Ever since the Reagan Revolution, the Republican Party has been the place where pollution poisoners, rip-off bankers, pharmaceutical hustlers, fossil-fuel thieves, climate deniers, asbestos and tobacco barons, real estate fraudsters, and tax cheats go to find the protections they need to continue operating.
Donald Trump, a real estate fraudster and serial criminal himself, even put Steve Mnuchin, the so-called “Foreclosure King” (who should’ve been prosecuted by California’s then-Attorney General Kamala Harris and sent to prison), in charge of the entire federal government’s pile of money.
He put the head of ExxonMobil, the company that’s been funding climate denialism and lying to the American people since the 1980s, in place as our Secretary of State.
He put a billionaire who Forbes, for G-d’s sake, called a “grifter” in charge of our Commerce Department.
Trump even tried to make America an open and public part of the dictator’s club by making nice with international criminals like the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil and Hungary, arguing that the US is the moral equivalent of autocratic, oligarch-run nations. It reflected his desire to move the US from “the moral equivalent” of such countries to actually joining the club by ending democracy and making himself an autocrat (see Jan 6th).
Few in the GOP even blinked. Crooks in our midst? Making common cause with international criminals? It’s just normal. It’s the “big tent” Republican Party.
Our current Secretary of the Treasury, former Fed Chair Janet Yellen, recently pointed out that the international criminal class operating in the United States has avoided paying an astonishing $7 trillion in taxes. That’s enough money to rebuild America, give us a national healthcare system, and put everybody in this country who wants to go through college for free.
But, as Mitch McConnell will tell you with a smile and a drawl, Americans can’t have nice things because the tax-cheat criminals among the billionaires and their companies in America don’t want to pay their taxes.
But it’s not just the American billionaires among the international criminal class who are causing such chaos in this country; it’s also the politicians they’ve bought, ever since the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with Citizens United. Politicians like McCarthy, McConnell and the vast majority of Republicans still in Congress.
When Richard Nixon was caught lying about Watergate and his illegal spying on the DNC, or the bribes he took from Jimmy Hoffa, the milk lobby and MacDonalds, Americans were shocked. Most importantly, Republicans were shocked. It was a group of Republicans, led by Barry Goldwater, who told Nixon he had to go.
This was before the Reagan Revolution, and most in the Republican Party still believed in the rule of law. No more.
As if to prove that to the entire world, Republicans in the House of Representatives yesterday officially declared that telling lies is a necessary prerequisite for good standing in the Party. And telling lies when it comes to life and death issues like war and peace, or who won or lost an election, as we all know, is either an explicit legal or definite moral crime.
This is not a new phenomenon; America regularly does battle with these people, even at the founding of our country. The American Revolution was fought against the international criminal class.
By the 1770s the British East India Company had already spent nearly 100 years bribing governments, stealing natural resources, smuggling contraband and evading taxes.
When they bribed/convinced the British Parliament to pass the Tea Act of 1773, which radically cut the Company’s taxes so they could wipe out small American colonial tea sellers, Sam Adams and his friends said “enough!“ and dumped over a million dollars (in today’s money) worth of their tea in Boston Harbor, kicking off the American Revolution.
In the weeks leading up to the Boston Tea Party, a still-unknown patriot who went by the name of Rusticus posted billboards all over Boston that said:
Are we in like Manner to be given up to the Disposal of the East India Company, who have now the Assurance, to step forth in Aid of the Minister, to execute his Plan, of enslaving America? Their Conduct in Asia, for some Years past, has given simple Proof, how little they regard the Laws of Nations, the Rights, Liberties, or Lives of Men. … Fifteen hundred Thousands, it is said, perished by Famine in one Year, not because the Earth denied its Fruits; but [because] this Company and their Servants engulfed all the Necessaries of Life, and set them at so high a Rate that the poor could not purchase them.
The Revolution put an end to that here, but the international criminal class soon got their hooks back into America.
In the early to mid-1800s, the oligarchic barons of the South found common cause with the international criminal class in both the slave and the cotton trades. By 1860 democracy was dead in the Confederate states, and a few thousand wealthy families ruled that part of America as, essentially, an organized crime syndicate supported by and interacting with similar wealthy criminals around the planet.
As I lay out in detail in the first third of my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it took the Civil War to stop them.
Eighty years later, the international criminal class threw in big-time with Tojo and Hitler, while their US members financed an attempted coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their biggest mistake was trying to hire General Smedley Butler to do the deed of kidnapping or killing Roosevelt and replacing him with a “good Republican president.“
Butler, an incorruptible patriot and the nation’s most decorated Marine general at the time, turned them in and blew up the conspiracy that had been organized and funded by some of the wealthiest and most powerful families in America, in collaboration with wealthy criminals in other countries.
Things all changed, however, when Reagan came to power in 1981. He revived Americans making common cause with the international criminal class, changing the Republican Party for the next 40 years.
He traded American weaponry for hostages to win election; illegally armed murderous thugs and overthrew governments while smuggling cocaine into the US; opened up the banking laws to criminal behavior so widely that the entire Savings & Loan structure collapsed and the bailout of Republican-connected bankers cost America $7 trillion; explicitly and overtly supported the brutal and racist apartheid and internationally-recognized-criminal government of South Africa; stole money from the EPA’s Superfund and funneled it into Republican election campaigns and then refused to turn records of that crime over to Congress; surveilled, harassed and intimidated journalists; rigged HUD grants and redirected the money to Republican donors; helped Osama bin Laden start what became Al-Qaeda; and eliminated 40,000 beds for mental patients in America, kicking off an explosion of homelessness that echoes to this day.
Bush and Dick Cheney lied us into two unnecessary wars that killed millions of human beings and killed and maimed thousands of Americans, while protecting the fossil fuel industry in its ongoing lies about climate change. They also radically cut taxes on American billionaires, while stripping money and resources from the working class.
Liz Cheney is now arguing that Republicans should at least respect elections, ignoring Nixon’s treason with South Vietnam to kill LBJ’s 1968 peace plan, or Reagan’s treason with the Iranians, or her own father’s lies to America and the world about Iraq.
She’s behaving like the GOP is something worth saving, but the Party has been too deeply embedded with the international criminal class for too long to take such imprecations seriously. They can’t even back away from Trump’s lies and his embrace of foreign oligarchs and autocrats.
McConnell, McCarthy and congressional Republicans need a billion dollars to win the next cycle of elections, so now instead of extracting their Party from the international criminal class they’re hot on the hunt among those very folks for the funds.
Which raises the question: is the GOP even worth saving?
Original post: HartmannReport.com
The GOP's Dark Death Plot to Win Elections
Authoritarian Trump followers within the GOP are actively promoting death and disease among Americans to win elections. The brutality and cynicism is breathtaking.
As we saw yesterday, Rand Paul and several of his Republican colleagues in the Senate, grilling Dr. Fauci, did their best to advance one of the GOP‘s two major 2022/2024 election strategies.
The first of those strategies, of course, is to replace actual election officials with Republican hacks so they can throw out the votes they don’t like and simply decide elections on their own. That strategy also includes suppressing the vote and stopping people from voting, as GOP Governor Ducey did yesterday, throwing 140,000 voters (including 30,000 Latinos) off the early voting rolls.
As I wrote yesterday, they’ve passed those laws in several states now and are proposing them in nearly every state in the union, and the only defense American democracy has against them is the For The People Act, which hinges on changing or ending the filibuster.
But the second, and most evil part of their strategy — at least in the context of their total disregard for human life — has to do with the coronavirus.
Their logic goes something like this:
1. Convince enough Americans not to get vaccinated that the country never reaches herd immunity and President Joe Biden therefore cannot get the virus crisis under control.
2. The failure of Biden to control the virus will mean, like what happened to Trump, that the economy will not get back to full functioning, either.
3. As any first-year Political Science student can tell you, the biggest single variable in most elections, particularly federal elections, is the economy. If Republicans can keep the economy off-balance by keeping the virus circulating, they’ll have a much better chance of winning elections in 2022 and particularly in the presidential race in 2024. And if they can use uncertainty about when the coronavirus crisis may end here to crash the stock market, that gets them double bonus points!
This strategy, aggressively supported by right-wing media, requires creating doubt about the virus generally and the vaccines in particular. It’s why about half the Republicans in Congress refuse to say whether they’ve been vaccinated or not, and why Trump and his wife took their shots in secret before they left the White House.
Tucker Carlson has been “asking questions“ about people who died after getting vaccinated, as if the vaccines had anything to do with their deaths (it didn’t), echoing similar lies told by America’s dumbest senator, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson.
Right-wingers and conspiracy nuts on radio and across the Internet, and bots and trolls from multiple foreign countries filling thousands of Facebook groups, are coming right out and warning people against getting vaccinated.
Their freak-outs include everything from the theory that Bill Gates is putting tracking chips in the vaccines so he can know where you are (presumably these people don’t know about cell phones?) to suggestions that mRNA vaccines “alter your DNA” (they don’t) and could turn us into zombies, mutants, or even make us all liberals.
In yesterday’s hearing, more than one Republican senator tried to produce a clip worthy of getting themselves on Fox News by suggesting that people who have had the coronavirus don’t need to get vaccinated because they are “already immune.”
Fauci has already shot that one down; people who had the “wild” variety of coronavirus earlier in the year can still get just as sick or even die from the South African variant, which is spreading across the United States right now, and because the Indian variant contains some of the same mutations presumably it can also infect and kill people who have already had the “wild” first-generation coronavirus.
The vaccines, however, actually produce an immunity to all of these variants that’s stronger than the natural immunity of having had coronavirus in its original form. None of that actual science, however, mattered to the Republicans speaking yesterday.
Rand Paul, for his part, tried his best to promote the idea that somehow Fauci was in on an evil plot years ago to send money to China to develop a weaponized coronavirus that they would then unleash on the world like, you know, a year ago.
It’s a classic example of how a grain of truth can be turned into a sand castle of lies.
It’s true that governments, including China and the United States, have been engaged in biological warfare experiments for decades, which includes weaponizing viruses. When anthrax (a bacterium) was mailed to leading Democrats and news media after 9/11 just in time to promote passage of the PATRIOT Act, it was traced back to a US weapons lab, for example.
What’s not true, however, and what Rand Paul was trying to get people to believe is that labs doing basic virology research, including the lab in Wuhan, are not only involved in this kind of research but are intentionally responsible for the pandemic.
There’s a remote possibility that some part of his hypothesis is correct — the part about the Covid virus escaping from the lab in Wuhan — but nobody knows for sure at this point in time and it’s considered extremely unlikely by most credible sources. Even if true, though, it has nothing to do with Paul’s questioning.
Because that wasn’t the point he was trying to make: what Rand Paul was trying to do is discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci and the entire public health team surrounding President Biden, so Americans will not believe what they say and therefore won’t get vaccinated.
Which takes us back to the second of the two Republican election strategies: keep the virus circulating in America; thus keeping the US economy in chaos; then run ads complaining about the “bad Democrat economy” and use that to win elections in 2022 and 2024.
The raw brutality of this election strategy is extraordinary.
The number of new coronavirus infections in the United States has now dropped below 30,000 a day, and the number of deaths is consistently well below the 400-a-day mark. This is a huge contrast to the time when Donald Trump was pushing people back into the workplace to get re-elected and we were seeing hundreds of thousands of people infected and thousands dying every day.
No matter how hard Rand Paul and his Republican colleagues try, enough of us are vaccinated now that they won’t get America back to those kinds of terrible numbers. But they apparently think they can get the numbers to stay high enough that the economy will remain in crisis and Republicans can use it as a wedge issue.
And, looking at their behavior, it appears they don’t care how many Americans die to get them there.
Original post: HartmannReport.com
The Democrats' "Killer App" Against Voter Suppression Unveiled
With all their new “voter suppression” laws in the states, Republicans are working to keep and improve a corrupt system that’s put them in power and keeps them in power, despite only representing a minority of Americans nationwide.
That’s why they’re trying to change our election law with little tweaks like making it harder to get a mail-in ballot or preventing people from bringing a drink of water to somebody in line.
This is not about making genuinely new law. The bigger picture, for them, is hanging onto to the power they and their billionaire supporters have already grabbed.
In fact, they’re trying to solidify, cement, deepen and broaden an already corrupted system that got them power in the first place and has kept them in power for the better part of at least two decades since the Supreme Court Bush v Gore decision in 2001 and the later Shelby County decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Billionaires were brought into the act with Citizens United in 2010.
In several states, like Michigan and Wisconsin (among others), the majority of voters in the state vote for Democrats — resulting in Democrats as governors and in other statewide offices — but Republicans, because of the corrupt system that includes things like gerrymanders, still control the state House and Senate as well as sending a majority of Republicans to Congress in DC.
They’re trying to maintain this larger status quo while tweaking and tightening it with these new laws.
Which is why when state officials and even Trump-appointed judges concluded, in Red state after Red state, that the 2020 election was clean, fair and accurate, the GOP decided to do something about the new crisis they now confront.
That crisis is that they repeatedly lost even more elections in 2020.
Georgia lost two Senate seats, numerous formerly Republican states went for Joe Biden instead of the previous guy, and Democrats got elected to state legislatures and as governors.
Republicans lost the House, the Senate, and the White House. Emergency! It’s not supposed to work this way!
The Republican solution to this, of course, is to make it harder to vote, harder to register to vote, and harder to mail-in vote. But while those are the things that get the headlines, the really insidious stuff is rarely mentioned.
It comes in two parts.
The first is that they’re replacing professional, long-term, non-partisan polling officials and election referees with Republican partisan hacks, so they can decide which votes the state is going to count and which votes they’re going to throw out.
The second is that they’re inviting goons into the polling places to harass, intimidate and threaten people whose only crime is that they want to participate in their own democracy. They call these goons “poll watchers,” and in the past such people have shown up with baseball bats, Confederate flags, and even video recording equipment.
This poll-watching thing used to be a big deal across the country before it was first outlawed in 1965: former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist actually got his start in Republican politics in the early 1960s doing this with something called Operation Eagle Eye in Arizona. Mostly it was stopped by the Voting Rights Act, but the US Supreme Court has since gutted that so now the GOP wants to get back to it.
Thus, Republicans are now reviving a pair of strategies that Democrats used to use in the Old South, before 1964/1965 when Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which flipped the white-racist vote from Democratic to Republican in a single decade.
Republicans are now trying to stop people from voting — or having their votes counted — pretty much any way they can.
And they’re picking up steam! As of a bit over a month ago, the Brennen Center for Justice noted:
As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states. That’s 108 more than the 253 restrictive bills tallied as of February 19, 2021 — a 43 percent increase in little more than a month.
These measures have begun to be enacted. Five restrictive bills have already been signed into law. In addition, at least 55 restrictive bills in 24 states are moving through legislatures: 29 have passed at least one chamber, while another 26 have had some sort of committee action (e.g., a hearing, an amendment, or a committee vote).
Democrats, however, have a “killer app” that will stop these Republican voter suppression and election-rigging efforts dead in their tracks.
It’s the first piece of legislation passed out of the House of Representatives and the first put on the floor of the United States Senate, HR1 and SB1, with the official name of the For The People Act.
Outside of reducing the ability of states to mail out absentee ballots, every one of the dozen-plus strategies Republicans are building into their laws to rig the vote would be blocked or outlawed by this legislation.
It’s the giant killer. (There’s a good explainer here.)
As Vox noted:
More than 80 percent of respondents said they supported preventing foreign interference in elections, limiting the influence of money in politics, and modernizing election infrastructure to increase election security. More than 60 percent of respondents supported requiring nonpartisan redistricting commissions, a 15-day early voting period for all federal elections, same-day registration for all eligible voters, automatic voter registration for all eligible voters, and giving every voter the option to vote by mail.
It will guarantee that every citizen in this country, regardless of their race or economic status, will have an equal right to vote in all elections that have any federal component whatsoever. (Most Americans don’t realize that there is no affirmative right to vote in the Constitution, so we need laws like this to protect that right.)
It also means that the small number of billionaires who spend the largest amount of money on our elections will have to identify themselves, something they strongly object to.
As People for the American Way President Ben Jealous noted, in the 2016 election alone, “just 400 political donors gave a combined $1.5 billion — more than five million small donors combined.” This law will will require transparency on their part and give campaigns that rely on smaller donors a boost.
And the majority of the people want it! Multiple studies and polls have shown that when the provisions of the law are explained to voters, an overwhelming majority of Democrats and a solid majority of Republicans are heartily in favor of it.
The For The People Act is also co-sponsored by 49 out of the 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats; the lone holdout is a West Virginia multimillionaire who shows up on Fox News a lot.
It’s a 100% certainty that Republicans will filibuster this legislation, which means 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats need to get together and either end the filibuster or, as I’ve frequently suggested, convert it into a “Jimmy Stewart Filibuster,“ where senators can talk as long as they want and as long as they have 40 colleagues with them on the Senate floor, but when they’re done or their number of colleagues drops below 40, a vote will happen.
It’s unlikely that you or I will have much influence on Joe Manchin (unless you live in West Virginia or are a major campaign donor of his), but we can make our opinions known to President Biden and Senator Schumer, who have a variety of options, both carrots and sticks, when it comes to dealing with recalcitrant or attention-seeking senators. We can also let our own senators know our opinion so they can speak with Manchin.
The way to send a message to President Biden is through the portal at www.whitehouse.gov/contact, and you can call Senator Schumer’s office — and your senators’ offices — via the Capitol building’s switchboard at 202-224-3121.
Tag - you’re it!
Original post with links to sources at: HartmannReport.com
The Deep Delusions of The GOP Stripped Down
Jamie Dimon is whining about Biden’s upcoming tax increases on rich people like himself: screw him. But more about that in a minute.
Ever since the late 1970s and early 1980s, both the Republican and Democratic parties have been operating, in part, on delusion and fantasy.
It really goes back to the 1940s and 1950s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was putting America back together after the Republican Great Depression and rich people were looking for a way to reduce that 90% top tax rate and get rid of those pesky unions that FDR had legalized.
A few conservative economic “thinkers” like Milton Friedman began promoting the notion that the classical economics the world had operated on for 7000 years, referred to in that era as demand-side economics, Adam Smith economics or Keynesianism, were now out of date. Democracy was also out of date, according to these people.
Prior to this time, everyone pretty much understood that economies were sort of like football games. There were players, rules and referees.
The players ranged from the very rich to the very poor, from factory owners to workers; the rules defined how much the rich could exploit the poor and how society could protect itself from their depredations; and the referees were the government agencies that oversaw those regulations.
The main thing that informs and defines the rules, which Adam Smith wrote two books about during the Revolutionary era — particularly his Theory of Moral Sentiments — is the question, “What is best for society as a whole?”
Is the economy here to serve us, or are we here to serve the economy?
It was the essential question of democracy. The idea laid out in the Declaration of Independence that “governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
As various societies have learned over the years, including ours during that time after the Republican Great Depression, having rules that protected the least powerful and most vulnerable of the “players” in the economic game actually worked to the benefit of everybody.
When workers could have unions, financial institutions were carefully regulated, and there were limits to how much wealth and power could be accumulated by an individual company or family (mostly through tax policy), it built, grew and helped society as a whole.
But Friedman and his ilk promoted the idea that in the “modern age” of the 1960s and 1970s, sending men to the moon and flying across oceans in a matter of hours, the slow and methodical process of regulating an economy through government action was out of date.
There was just no way, he said, that any government bureaucracy could have a close enough finger on the pulse of the marketplace to really know what should be regulated, when, or how.
Many of his followers, who spun off into the Libertarian and Objectivist movements before taking over the GOP, even went so far as to say that democracy was merely “mob rule” and should be replaced by an aristocracy of the very wealthy, who clearly knew what they were doing and how things worked or they wouldn’t be as rich as they were.
Friedman argued that instead of democracy — government, bureaucrats, and politicians making decisions about an economy — the largest “players” in the economy (the very, very rich) should be making those decisions because, every moment of every day, they were watching how the marketplace was moving, changing and reacting to new and different circumstances.
The “free market” would always, Friedman and his followers said, be superior to any government in terms of creating and producing the optimal outcome for all members of society. There were a million decisions a second being made in the “free market,” after all; wasn’t that a better base of data than monthly government statistics?
The key to it all, they said, was to get government out of the business of making rules for the economy or enforcing those rules. Instead, just leave that up to the ultra-rich and the barons of industry, who had all the data and knew what they were doing.
The main part of the process they were advocating was called “deregulation.” Ending oversight — regulation — of the economy by government.
Billionaire David Koch was so enamored of it that when he ran for vice president in 1980 he called for the end of virtually all federal regulatory agencies. Just leave it up to the billionaires: everything will get better.
These new economic and political ideologies circulated throughout the western world, and had their first serious tryout in 1973 when Augusto Pinochet took over Chile in a military coup and brought in Friedman and his “University of Chicago” acolytes to advise him.
Pinochet privatized the country’s Social Security program and murdered thousands who protested against him. His favorite method was throwing protesters out of helicopters, a deed memorialized on the Tee-shirts worn by numerous hard-right groups in the US during the George Floyd murder protests.
As Naomi Klein wrote of Pinochet’s time:
…Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to dismantle Chile's public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early 80s, Pinochet's Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialisation, a tenfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns.
That seemed to be working out for the elites, so in 1978 when Margaret Thatcher came to power as Prime Minister of Great Britain she tried to follow a similar path. She smashed the nation’s largest union, the coal miners, and deregulated and then sold off much of the nation’s rail infrastructure, among other things.
That was the year some Democrats started thinking maybe there was something to this stuff. In the last two years of his administration, 1979 and 1980, Jimmy Carter deregulated the trucking and travel industries, among others.
(I speak from first-hand experience: Louise and I jumped into this “new marketplace opportunity” with a travel business in Atlanta that we started from scratch in 1983, then sold in 1986 and took a year off in Germany to do international relief work.)
In 1981, when Reagan was sworn in as president, deregulation became the official policy of the US government as he slashed regulations across whole and huge industrial sectors and begin the process of aggressively dismantling America’s unions and other worker, environmental and consumer protections.
In 1993, figuring “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Bill Clinton and the New Democrats pursued similar policies, proudly declaring an end to “welfare as we know it” and “the era of big government.” (In the UK, Tony Blair destroyed the Labour Party by doing the same thing.)
Clinton brought in slightly more liberal versions of Friedman as his economic advisers and close friends — Jamie Dimon, Lawrence Summers and “the Davos crowd”; their consensus was to keep taxes and regulations low, to stop pushing for unions, and to embrace a new policy called “austerity.” It was simply a thinly-veiled system for stripping assets and protections from poor and working-class Americans and handing them off to the very rich, some of whom were then supporting Democrats as enthusiastically as Republicans.
But here we are in 2021.
The Republican embrace of these economic delusions remains unshaken. Working class Republicans will tell you that unions are a terrible thing and that the government needs to stay out of regulating business or protecting the environment. They recite right-wing talking points about how unemployment insurance produces sloth and laziness, but tax cuts for billionaires actually energize them to do more for all of us.
Democrats, however, largely appear to be waking up. Thankfully, there was a strain of clearheaded people within the Democratic Party throughout this entire period of time.
The Paul Wellstone, Bernie Sanders, Jan Shakowsky, Sherrod Brown wing of the Democratic Party that has always supported workers’ rights, been skeptical of “free trade” and “free markets,” and knew that without good, strong rules for the game of economics the richest people will always steamroller rest of us.
As noted earlier, Clinton’s old buddy Jamie Dimon is now out there squealing about how his taxes are going to go up after his bank took billions in bailouts (some of which ended up in his pocket), but, thankfully, Democrats generally are ignoring him and his ilk. Lawrence Summers is similarly crying in his beer. They’re dinosaurs and their time is past.
In the past two weeks Joe Biden has repeatedly proclaimed, “Trickle-down economics has never worked.” He’s openly rejecting Friedman’s ideas, Reagan’s policies, and the austerity economics that the leadership of the Democratic Party have danced with for the last 30 years.
This is a Very Good Thing.
As Democrats are waking up, the GOP is sinking deeper and deeper into delusion, now embracing the idea that the losers of elections (Trump) should be declared winners and Republican-controlled state legislatures should be deciding who won elections rather than voters (the new FL/TX/IA/AZ laws).
The leadership of the Republican Party clearly understands the con they’re running, and the Big Lie that Trump is promoting and to which they’re swearing fealty. But rank-and-file Republican voters, indoctrinated by billionaire oligarch Murdoch’s Fox so-called News and other right-wing sources, are keeping to their crazy, bot-flooded Facebook rooms and sinking deeper and deeper into delusion.
The Republican Party, still clinging to Friedman’s ideas and celebrating Pinochet and Thatcher, has gone from being a threat to the lives, health and wealth of working people to being a full-on threat to democracy and our republic itself.
Thankfully, the Democratic Party is returning to its progressive FDR roots. Time will tell if the GOP returns to the real world, but the Democratic Party is off to a good start at bringing this country back to rational economics and political sanity after 40 years of crazy that even they dabbled with.
Original post with links: HartmannReport.com
Americans Must Repudiate the Connection Between a Child-Murderer, Reaganism and Trumpism
The roots and brutality of the hard-right grew in the soil of libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s writingsMany Americans are baffled by the Republican Party’s embrace of billionaire sociopath Trump and elected Republicans’ willingness to overlook the death of seven Americans, including three police officers, in an attempted coup. (Particularly after they spent over 2 years and tens of millions of dollars obsessing on 4 dead Americans in Benghazi.)
They’re also wondering why Kevin McCarthy would reject Liz Cheney to embrace someone like Elise Stefanik, an apologist for the January 6 treason attempt, or go along with Mitch McConnell’s attempts to sabotage the American Rescue Plan, the American Jobs Plan, and the American Family Plan.
After all, people are hurting. We’re experiencing the worst pandemic in a century, and an economic downturn unmatched since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s.
Why, Americans wonder, would the GOP embrace such anti-American and nakedly brutal politics and policies?
Why would they try so hard to destroy Medicare and Social Security? Why would they mourn the loss of Trump’s program to tear children from their families and throw them into cages? Why are they so enthusiastic about efforts to make it harder to vote?
Why do they continue to support Trump after he lost the House, Senate, and White House and continues to rant his anti-American, anti-democratic strongman rhetoric?
But it’s not just politics; the roots of this brutal movement in today’s GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, through a real-estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice and bringing a number of right-wing billionaires into the fold.
As a result, Republican policies over the past 40 years not only gutted America’s middle class, but led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led. Many Americans are now so confused about how government should work that they’ve embraced a bizarre conspiracy theory positing Trump as a sort of messiah and politicians like McConnell and Stefanick as noble statesmen and -women.
The Libertarians
Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.
This new Libertarian Party would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.
Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army and a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.
In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, close public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end food and housing support and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.
Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.
The child-killer who inspired a movement
Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous sociopath in 1927.
Back in 2015, Donald Trump told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”
“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”
Ayn Rand’s novels have animated libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.
Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”
Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get what he wanted. Sort of like the plans of the person who planted bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters the night before January 6th.
Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”
On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote that he “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”
It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.
Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.
Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”
After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.
The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.
“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”
Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.
“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”
But Hickman wasn’t finished. “After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”
Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.
He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.
On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.
Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.
Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.
To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.
Ayn Rand falls in love with a “superman”
But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.
Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.
She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”
That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.
Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.
William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.
Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.
Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.
She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”
Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.
As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.
“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”
Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote, “It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”
Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”
The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.
“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”
Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.
Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.
Libertarianism and Ayn Rand set the stage for Trumpism
Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.
And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good.
As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”
Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”
Sociopaths of the world, unite!
Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.
Like Trump, McConnell, Stefanik and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.
In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.
Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.
Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes.
Suggesting that selfishness undermines most truly American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.
“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”
As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.” (4:20 in the clip)
“We’re taught to feel concern for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged, “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other — now why do you rebel?”
“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered. She added, “[Man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”
Rand’s philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did — in her lifetime — achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. But today Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the United States.
Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly sociopathic president.
The result so far is over a half-million dead Americans, an economy laid waste, and the collapse of this nation’s working class.
While the ideas and policies promoted by the libertarian wing of the Republican Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich in recent decades, it’s killing the rest of us.
A return to sanity
In the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt put America back together after the First Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.
Today, 40 years of Ayn Rand’s ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any kings or Pharos in the history of the world, and brought a whole new generation of suckers, hustlers and grifters into the GOP.
When America was still coasting on FDR’s success in rebuilding our government and institutions, nobody took very seriously Rand’s or Koch’s misguided idealist efforts to tear it all down.
Now that libertarians and objectivists in the GOP have had 40 years to make their project work, we’re hitting peak libertarianism and it’s tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing people every day.
If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, and rebuild our civil institutions.
That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 40 years of Rand’s writings and libertarian “Reagan Republicans” have done to this country.
It will succeed if President Biden can overcome the cynicism and greed celebrated by McConnell, McCarthy and Stefanik, reclaim the mantle of FDR, and pull America out of the Second Republican Great Depression.
Original post with links and embedded video of Rand: HartmannReport.com
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Name: Thom HartmannGender: Male
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