May 7, 2021

Will Barr Get Away With Covering Up Treason for HW Bush, Reagan & Now Trump?

George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan were facing the possibility of treason charges. Who did they call? Bill Barr.

That was in the ’80s and early ’90s, but now we discover the Bill Barr really, truly, definitely also lied to America about presidential treason this decade. Shocking.

Mueller laid out 10 prosecutable incidents of Donald Trump committing felony obstruction of justice, all to cover up the assistance he was seeking and receiving from Russian oligarchs and the Russian government that ultimately helped him win the 2016 election.

Looking back now, seeing the actual documents from the time, Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson noted that Barr’s lies to the American people, to Congress, and to federal judges were “so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence.”

In other words, Barr lied through his teeth.

And he did it to avoid prosecuting Trump, who we can now see had clearly committed crimes — particularly reaching out to a foreign power for help — that would’ve landed any other American in prison for decades.

But this is not Bill Barr‘s first time playing cover-up for a Republican president who had committed crimes that rise to treason against America.

Back in 1992, the last time Bill Barr was U.S. attorney general, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.”

Christmas day of 1992, the New York Times featured a screaming all-caps headline across the top of its front page: Attorney General Bill Barr had covered up evidence of crimes by Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra scandal.

Earlier that week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.

But Bush’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to Connecticut, Maine, or Texas (where he had mansions) but, rather, that he may end up embroiled even deeper in the Iran-Contra treason and that he and his colleagues may face time in a federal prison after he left office.

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on him and Reagan, and Bush’s private records, subpoenaed by the independent counsel’s office, were the key to it all.

Walsh had been appointed independent counsel in 1986 to investigate the Iran-Contra activities of the Reagan administration and determine if crimes had been committed.

Was the Iran-Contra criminal conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan said on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to a hostage-taking in Lebanon?

Or had it started in the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter with treasonous collusion with the Iranians, as the then-president of Iran asserted? Who knew what, and when? And what was George H.W. Bush’s role in it all?

In the years since then, the President of Iran in 1980, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, has gone on the record saying that the Reagan campaign reached out to Iran to hold the hostages in exchange for weapons.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan,” President Bani-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor in 2013, ”had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

That wouldn’t have been just an impeachable crime: it was treason.

Walsh had zeroed in on documents that were in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who all the evidence showed was definitely in on the deal, and President Bush’s diary that could corroborate it.

Elliott Abrams had already been convicted of withholding evidence about it from Congress, and he may have even more information, too, if it could be pried out of him before he went to prison. But Abrams was keeping mum, apparently anticipating a pardon.

Weinberger, trying to avoid jail himself, was preparing to testify that Bush knew about it and even participated, and Walsh had already, based on information he’d obtained from the investigation into Weinberger, demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign. He was also again hot on the trail of Abrams.

So Bush called in his attorney general, Bill Barr, and asked his advice.

Barr, along with Bush, was already up to his eyeballs in cover-ups of shady behavior by the Reagan administration.

Safire ultimately came refer to Barr as “Coverup-General” in the midst of another scandal—one having to do with Bush selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein—because the Attorney General was already covering up for Bush, Weinberger, and others from the Reagan administration in “Iraqgate.”

On October 19, 1992, Safire wrote of Barr’s unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into Iraqgate:

“Why does the Coverup-General resist independent investigation? Because he knows where it may lead: to Dick Thornburgh, James Baker, Clayton Yeutter, Brent Scowcroft and himself [the people who organized the sale of WMD to Saddam]. He vainly hopes to be able to head it off, or at least be able to use the threat of firing to negotiate a deal.”

Now, just short of two months later, Bush was asking Barr for advice on how to avoid another very serious charge in the Iran-Contra crimes. How, he wanted to know, could they shut down Walsh’s investigation before Walsh’s lawyers got their hands on Bush’s diary?

In April of 2001, safely distant from the swirl of D.C. politics, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center was compiling oral presidential histories, and interviewed Barr about his time as AG in the Bush White House. They brought up the issue of the Weinberger pardon, which put an end to the Iran-Contra investigation, and Barr’s involvement in it.

Turns out, Barr was right in the middle of it.

“There were some people arguing just for [a pardon for] Weinberger, and I said, ‘No, in for a penny, in for a pound,’” Barr told the interviewer. “I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others.”

Which is exactly what Bush did, on Christmas Eve when most Americans were with family instead of watching the news. The holiday notwithstanding, the result was explosive.

America knew that both Reagan and Bush were up to their necks in Iran-Contra, and Democrats had been talking about treason, impeachment or worse. The independent counsel had already obtained one conviction, three guilty pleas, and two other individuals were lined up for prosecution. And Walsh was closing in fast on Bush himself.
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So, when Bush shut the investigation down by pardoning not only Weinberger, but also Abrams and the others involved in the crimes, destroying Walsh’s ability to prosecute anybody, the New York Times ran the headline all the way across four of the six columns on the front page, screaming in all-caps: BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP.’

Bill Barr had struck, and, like with Trump and the Muller investigation into his treason, Reagan and Bush’s treason was now buried.

The second paragraph of the Times story by David Johnston laid it out:

“Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.” (emphasis added)

History shows that when a Republican president is in serious legal trouble, Bill Barr is the go-to guy.

For William Safire, it was déjà vu all over again. Four months earlier, referring to Iraqgate (Bush’s selling WMDs to Iraq), Safire opened his article, titled “Justice [Department] Corrupts Justice,” by writing:

“U.S. Attorney General William Barr, in rejecting the House Judiciary Committee’s call for a prosecutor not beholden to the Bush Administration to investigate the crimes of Iraqgate, has taken personal charge of the cover-up.”

Safire accused Barr of not only rigging the cover-up, but of being one of the criminals who could be prosecuted.

“Mr. Barr,” wrote Safire in August of 1992, “...could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein’s perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine.”

He added, “They [Barr and colleagues] have a keen personal and political interest in seeing to it that the Department of Justice stays in safe, controllable Republican hands.”

Earlier in Bush’s administration, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate, as Safire repeatedly documented in the Times. In December, Barr helped Bush block indictments from another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that Reagan or George H.W. Bush would be held to account for Iran-Contra.

Walsh, wrote Johnston for the Times on Christmas Eve, “plans to review a 1986 campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush.” The diary would be the smoking gun that would nail Bush to the scandal.

“But,” noted the Times, “in a single stroke, Mr. Bush [at Barr’s suggestion] swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986.”

And Walsh didn’t take it lying down.

The Times report noted that, “Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.’”

Independent Counsel Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented, “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”

The phrase “highest ranking” officials included Reagan, Bush and Barr himself.

Walsh had been fighting to get those documents ever since 1986, when he was appointed and Reagan still had two years left in office. Bush’s and Weinberger’s refusal to turn them over, Johnston noted in the Times, could have, in Walsh’s words, “forestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” through a pattern of “deception and obstruction.”

Barr successfully covered up the involvement of two Republican presidents—Reagan and Bush—in two separate and impeachable “high crimes,” one of them almost certainly treason.

Months later in January of 1993, newly sworn-in President Clinton and the new Congress decided to put it all behind them and not pursue the matters any further.

Will Biden do the same, for both Trump and Barr? He’s publicly said that he’s going to let his new attorney general, Merrick Garland, make those kinds of decisions.

And Garland, it seems, has unleashed the FBI and other investigators in ways that must be sending shock-waves through Mar-a-Lago and the ranks of former Trump officials.

One can only hope…

Original post with NY Times front page: HartmannReport.com

May 6, 2021

Just saw an ad for the NRA here on DU...

So I clicked on it so DU will get the revenue!!! Maybe they’ll be so impressed they’ll send DU even more cash…

(No doubt this is part of some sort of ad “package deal “ and DU had no idea an NRA ad was going to pop up, but, still, what a great chance to transfer money from the NRA to DU!!)

May 5, 2021

Why McConnell Is About to Destroy the GOP

Nobody is asking the bigger question: “Why would a professional, lifelong politician and master tactician like Mitch McConnell make such a huge mistake?”

Nobody’s asking, “Why?”

Just like he did with the Covid rescue bill a few months ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just said that there will not be one single Republican vote in support of President Joe Biden‘s infrastructure plan.

Why would McConnell do this?

Why would he give away any bargaining leverage the GOP might have?

Why would he essentially encourage Democrats to make the legislation as expansive, effective and popular as possible? And then let them get all the credit for it?

After all, now that the Democrats know there’s no possibility of any Republican votes, there’s no need for them to negotiate with any GOP senators. There’s no need for Democrats to worry about their Republican colleagues’ feelings, thoughts, concerns or even ask their opinions.

That simple reality has been noted by a number of commentators.

But nobody is asking the bigger question: “Why would a professional, lifelong politician and master tactician like Mitch McConnell make such a huge mistake?”

I believe the answer is that McConnell does not think he’s making a mistake. He thinks he’s right. He thinks he’s going to win.

I believe he has completely deluded himself. He has bought his own BS. And it won’t be the first time senior Republican leadership has done this and then destroyed the GOP in the process.

This is a guy, after all, who spent decades proclaiming Reaganomics and supply-side economics.

He’s probably asserted a thousand times that when taxes on rich people are cut and government spending goes down, good things will happen to the American economy. He’s repeatedly assured his voters that when unions are destroyed the working class prospers.

He’s embraced and endorsed 40 years of de-funding and ignoring America’s infrastructure, even to the point of frustrating Trump’s own infrastructure plan attempts. Over and over again, when proposed by Clinton and Obama, McConnell has suggested that rebuilding our country at the expense of taxing rich people would create an economic disaster.

For most Americans, forty years of experience with these theories that McConnell’s been promoting have proven that they’re largely crackpot BS. They’re fantasies sold to the American public by billionaires and the think-tanks they fund, amplified by right-wing radio and media, to keep the billionaire’s taxes down, their companies deregulated and unions out of their workplaces.

But they’ve been sold so aggressively — from the efforts in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by people like Hayek, von Misis and Milton Friedman, to Ronald Reagan and the institutional Republican party from 1980 to this day — that many Republicans actually do believe them.

Particularly multimillionaires — who hang out with billionaires — like McConnell.

And McConnell’s is not alone in this belief, even among significant Republican figures.

I regularly invite conservatives on my radio/TV program to defend propositions like those above, and there are several who I’ve come to know personally, and I know for a fact, that they actually believe these things.

Reaganomics hasn’t worked out, they say, because it hasn’t really been tried.

There’s been too much government spending clouding things. Taxes have never really been low enough. There’s never been a true libertarian experiment in America.

If we want to see if these theories actually work, they say, first we have to do away with Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, food stamps, public schools, public health departments and the whole plethora of government-supported institutions. Those things, they say, have so muddled up and distorted our economic systems that partial measures like partial deregulation and occasional tax cuts promoted by Republicans over the last 40 years haven’t had the success that they could have had in a “pure free-market economy.”

These people, who I know personally, are not saying what they’re saying because their paychecks depend upon it (although that is true of a few others that I know and have met in the media). They’re saying it because they believe it.

They studied it in college from Econ professors whose chairs were funded by right-wing billionaires and conservative foundations. They’ve read it over and over again in conservative books and magazines, and on conservative websites. They’ve been hearing it preached from the highest towers of conservatism their entire lives.

If Mitch McConnell is at all like them, he believes it’s true, too. He believes that rebuilding America using tax dollars from people earning over $400,000 a year will produce a disaster. He’s internalized that message.

Another clue that Mitch McConnell and many of his Republican colleagues actually believe this stuff was revealed at last weekend‘s Utah Republican party meeting, where Mitt Romney was booed.

It’s another sign that the ideology has taken deep hold and spread in the party. It’s become more important than the good of the party itself, as happened in 1964.

If Mitch McConnell is a true believer, he may well be in the “true believer mold” of Barry Goldwater.

If so, this is the second time this has happened in the Republican party in my lifetime. And it may presage the exact same kind of disaster that Barry Goldwater brought down upon the party in 1964.

I was only 13 at the time, but I remember watching the 1964 Republican convention with my dad when Nelson Rockefeller got up and gave a speech calling for moderation, compromise and a commitment to do what was best for the nation.

Referring to Goldwater and the right-wing true-believers who followed him, much like Mitt Romney referred to Trump and MAGAs, Rockefeller said, “These extremists feed off fear, hate and terror. They encourage disunity.” He was booed off the stage, as you can see in this short clip.

Then Barry Goldwater stepped up to the microphone and loudly proclaimed:

“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!!”

He brought down the house. The standing ovation lasted for minutes. They really believed him.

Prior to Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy, the Republican party of Dwight Eisenhower had been a pretty moderate place (including VP Nixon’s 1960 race against JFK).

Eisenhower advocated unionization and bragged about how many new union members had joined during his presidency. In 1956, when he ran for reelection, he highlighted how he’d helped increase the number of people on Social Security.

In his farewell address he prayed — literally prayed (14:55 on the recording) — for world peace, in the same speech he used to warn us about the Military-Industrial Complex.

But then the True Believers took over the GOP — to this day.

Goldwater went on to lose to LBJ in a massive landslide, and McConnell may well be leading his own party in a very similar direction.

Goldwater believed what he was saying. I’ve read both his autobiographies and there’s no doubt in my mind.

I can’t say that I am as much of a student of Mitch McConnell as I was of Barry Goldwater back in 1964 when, along with my dad, I went door to door for him in that presidential campaign.

But the first possible and most rational explanation for Mitch McConnell openly stating in advance that there will not be a single Republican vote for Biden’s plan is that McConnell thinks if Biden’s plan passes it will create a disaster.

He thinks that inflation will spike, the national debt will lead to some terrible national default, and/or the stock market along with the entire economy will go in the tank.

After all, that’s what he’s been preaching for 40 years. How hard is it to imagine that he’s come to believe his own sales pitch?

Sadly, for Mitch, all the empirical evidence indicates that his belief is just as misplaced as were Goldwater’s fears of communists in the State Department and the viability of using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.

The Republican party tried a very similar shtick back in 1920, when Warren Harding was elected President on a platform of dropping the 91% top tax rate down to 25%, deregulating industry and privatizing most government functions. He won that election, and kept those promises.

It led to the “Roaring Twenties” — a time when the very rich got very much richer and working people got screwed — and then straight to the stock market crash of 1929 and what was called for a generation the “Republican Great Depression.”

Perhaps McConnell doesn’t know the history. Perhaps he thinks that era was an anomaly, or an incomplete experiment, or there were other factors that caused the crash.

Or, if you’ve read this far, there’s one other possibility worth considering. Perhaps McConnell’s trying to implode the party to purge it of Trump.

It’s pretty far out, but maybe he’s letting folks trash Romney and Cheney and the rational few left in the party so it’ll fall so low in the 2022 election that Trump will be discredited and purged from the party himself.

That possibility, though, is a stretch. It still appears that the only reasonable explanation for Mitch McConnell refusing in advance to go along with anything Biden is proposing that might help America is that he truly believes that, at the end of the day, Biden‘s plans will be a disaster and he wants to have no part of them.

He’s wrong, but — in either case — he’s certainly not lacking in conviction.

Original post with embedded YouTube clips of Goldwater, Rockefeller and Eisenhower at: HartmannReport.com

May 4, 2021

Nomadland Exposes the Middle-Class Rip-Off

Forty years of Reaganism and trickle-down economics have left America pockmarked with refugee camps and people hanging onto life by their fingernails

The award-winning movie Nomadland is every bit as brilliant as the reviews, but it’s also, for this era, a hell of a wake-up call.

Chloé Zhao’s film is a brilliant drama centered around a central character named Fern (with a stellar performance by Frances McDormand), struggling to survive after the loss of her husband, job and home.

In addition to it being a great movie, at an only slightly deeper level it raises vitally important questions about how we’ve structured our economy and social safety net in America.

As a kid growing up, almost every weekend my brothers and I would accompany our parents across small-town Michigan looking for new Salvation Army and Goodwill stores. Mom and Dad collected “antiques,” principally small things like buttons, postcards, stamps and a whole variety of small figurines and glass from the late 19th century to the mid-20th.

Their plan was that when Dad qualified for retirement, they’d buy an RV and travel around the country going from flea market to flea market, antique store to antique store, selling the things they’d purchased years earlier.

Sometimes they found incredible deals: books or postcards or small glass plates that the second-hand store was selling for a dime or 25 cents but was actually worth five or ten dollars. Other things, like Hummel figurines, they simply bought and collected because they figured they’d appreciate in value over time.

If Dad hadn’t been killed by the lies of the asbestos industry, they could’ve pulled it off. Because he’d worked at a union shop for over 40 years, he had a good pension to supplement his Social Security and a health insurance supplement to his Medicare that would both continue until the day he died.

And, unlike the movie but like my parents’ fantasy, there are people living comfortably in vans and RVs around the country who are not hanging onto the edge of the last decades of their lives by their fingernails; they’re living the middle-class retirement my parents dreamed of, or even better. Some are even still young and working.

They’re the lucky ones.

The unlucky ones sleep in Walmart parking lots or on the public streets around America’s towns, migrating south and west during the winter, and back north and east during the summer. They find part-time work in Amazon warehouses or sell their blood or clean toilets.

And there are now a lot of people stuck in this 2021 version of homelessness. Nomadland is a movie about a few of them.

The last house Louise and I lived in here in Portland was on a main thoroughfare-type of public street and near a park, and about twice a month over the past year or two we’d wake up to find an ancient, battered RV parked on the street in front of our house. Every week it was a different one. More than once, after they left, we’d have to clean up the trash they left in our front yard, or hose down their sewage from the street.

Nomadland, and the nonfiction book of the same title on which it’s based, does an absolutely brilliant job of capturing The Grapes of Wrath type of lives some of these Americans find themselves living, and the kind of resilient, caring and compassionate communities people form when down on their luck.

And, it also raises an important set of questions that are almost entirely missing from public discussions about the movie.

Why are these people living such marginalized lives?

Why, in the richest country in the world, can’t we provide for people when capitalism fails and factories or even, like in Nomadland, entire “company towns” shut down and die off?

Why have we let our Social Security benefits be so badly eaten up over the years by inflation that they no longer provide a secure cushion for people as they age (not Fern, but some of her friends)?

Why, for that matter, did we tolerate Reagan (with his 1983 “saving” of Social Security) raising the Social Security retirement age to 67 and putting an income tax on the benefits, while explicitly insulating people with multi-million dollar incomes from having to pay a penny of Social Security tax on the vast majority of their income?

Why can’t everyone in America have complete and comprehensive healthcare at no cost, like people in the majority of the other countries of the developed world? Why, instead, when we lose our jobs like Fern did, do we also lose our healthcare and other fallback supports?

If, after watching Nomadland, you’re looking for a palate cleanser, check out Michael Moore’s Where To Invade Next? He travels around the world looking at countries that actually put into place social policies usually first advocated here in the United States, but have been blocked for generations by conservative politicians.

When people in Europe lose their jobs, or their factories get shut down, nobody loses their healthcare. Nobody gets kicked out of school because they can no longer pay tuition.

Rarely do people lose their homes, and in most advanced countries the social safety net catches them long before they hit the kind of rock-bottom that has become a norm in the United States.

In the nonfiction book that formed the basis for the movie, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century author Jessica Bruder writes: “Tales of money trouble were rampant. Sometimes I felt like I was wandering around post-recession refugee camps, places of last resort where Americans got shipped if the so-called ‘jobless recovery’ had exiled them from the traditional workforce.”

Forty years of Reaganism and trickle-down economics have left America pockmarked with refugee camps; some of them homeless tent cities, others clusters of RVs and vans, and many simply people sleeping rough on the street.

And while not explicitly raising these questions in a political or economic context, one can’t help watching this brilliant piece of movie-making without wondering, for weeks after, just how the hell America’s working class got so badly ripped off over the past two generations.

And wondering when we’re finally going to do something about it.

Original post: HartmannReport.com

May 3, 2021

America Now On the Verge of Re-Fighting the American Revolution?

Right-wing "Redcoat/Redhat" terrorists have openly proclaimed their goal of Americans fighting Americans in an ideological and racist war against democracy itself

Former Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney being booed in his own home state raise an urgent question: Are the Redcoats back?

The Republican party has now introduced over 300 pieces of legislation designed to make it more difficult for American citizens to participate in the process of selecting their representatives, the core function of a democratic republic.

They’ve also proposed or passed numerous laws criminalizing protest and dissent, primary American values written into the First Amendment, and given a “get out of jail free” card to people who kill protesters.

Today’s Republican party does not believe in democracy or the core idea on which this nation was founded:

“That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and “that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

As we see with their support of Trump’s Big Lie, they have a serious problem with that “consent of the governed” part of the Declaration of Independence. And they’re pretty sketchy about that whole human “rights” thing.

If it seems like America is re-fighting the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, it’s because there’s a sizeable group of rightwing Americans who say that’s what they think they’re doing.

In both of those past wars, one group of Americans believed in the ideal of democracy and a republic deriving its authority from the will and consent of its people. On the other side, there were people who believed that democracy was a dangerous experiment and a grave mistake.

During the Revolutionary War the anti-democracy folks were called Tories or Loyalists, because they were loyal to the British king and believed that the best form of government was a kingdom, and that letting average people participate in democratic governance would lead to disaster.

That was solidly a third, perhaps even half, of the white people then living in North America: they were willing to fight and die to keep America part of the United Kingdom.

Those who opposed democracy on this continent had a lot of history on their side.

For most of the 7,000 years of recorded human history at that point, governments had been run either by kings who seized power through violence, or priestly theocrats who claimed that their authority to rule came from God. (In most cases, regardless of who ended up on top, there was an unholy alliance between the two.)

The British United Kingdom was just the latest, in 1776, in a long series of kingdoms that ruled every part of Europe; the Greek experiment with democracy was 3000 years old at that time, and the Roman experiment with a republican form of government had failed almost 2000 years earlier.

There were a lot of reasons back then to think that a democratic republic would be a terrible mistake.

The main one was that it hadn’t worked in thousands of years, and the ancient Greek and Roman experiments were considered by many — most, actually — to have been failed experiments.

People believed so strongly either in the Loyalist necessity of a royal family, or the Founders’ hope of a people engaged in self-rule, that families were literally torn apart, brother killing brother, neighbors turning firearms against each other.

By the time of the Civil War, 80 years later, there was still a debate about whether democracy was anything more than some kind of liberal, airy-fairy idea that really didn’t work out all that well.

But this time, those Americans who took up arms against democracy were not fighting on behalf of a church or a king. They were fighting to support the rich, the oligarchs of the deep South.

As I lay out in detail in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, between 1820 and 1860 the South underwent a radical consolidation of wealth and property.

The invention of the Cotton Gin and its adoption in the early 1820s allowed the few plantations wealthy enough to buy one to effectively wipe out their smaller competitors and buy up their land.

As a result, by 1860 virtually all of the most productive land, wealth and political power of the South was consolidated in the hands of just a few thousand families.

They did not believe in democracy either; they declared war on America specifically to end democracy and establish a continent-wide oligarchy: rule by the rich in an oligarchic police state as the South had become.

The North won and democracy prevailed, but the idea of oligarchy survived and has been persistent throughout American history.

This is what the Republican party now represents: Oligarchy.

Rule by the rich and ignoring “the consent of the governed.”

The suppression of dissent, the oppression of minorities, and replacing the ballot box with the iron fist of a police state run of, by and for the wealthy few.

And they’re pushing us there really hard and really fast:

A political network run by a group of right-wing billionaires has a larger budget and more employees than the entire Republican party.

A family of billionaire oligarchs from Australia crank democracy-hating propaganda into the American political bloodstream nearly every day on cable television and in print.

Voices openly denigrating democracy and promoting hate and intolerance — the hallmarks of oligarchy — are on local radio and television in every American city every single day, and dominate the Internet.

The single largest source of threats and murders by terrorists in America are today committed by white-supremacist right-wingers who hate and fear the idea of a pluralistic, democratic society.

Tragically, for the third time in our history, Americans who believe in democracy find themselves again having to defend themselves against Americans who don’t.

Several of these hard-right groups have openly declared their intention to start a second American Civil War.

They say they want to see Americans killing each other in the name of white supremacy and rule by the rich, and some have followed their suggestion.

They declare their loyalty to a white-supremacist real estate oligarch from New York, get their news from Australian and Ukrainian oligarchs, and have embraced an ideology championed by Germans in the 1930s.

They even adorn themselves in red and wear funny hats like the British loyalists did in revolutionary times.

The Biden presidency represents America’s third, and perhaps final, chance to prove democracy is not merely an idealistic fantasy.

If his administration and the Democrats in Congress can succeed in conquering the coronavirus, putting the American economy back on track, and rebuilding the civil society that 40 years of Reaganism has so devastated, American democracy — and, indeed, democracy around the world — may well endure and even grow.

But Republicans are doing everything they can to keep that from happening, from discouraging vaccination and public health measures, to sabotaging our election systems, to amplifying their rhetoric of hate and terror across multiple media platforms.

When “moderate” voices within their ranks, like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney, dare pop their heads up, the majority of the Republican Party viciously attacks them.

Dissent is no longer allowed in the GOP.

Authoritarianism has prevailed.

Oligarchy has completely seized the party.

These, as Thomas Paine (a fervent believer in democracy) said, “are the times that try men’s souls.”

Long before actual conflict broke out, Paine wrote: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered…”

We must not let the right-wing Redcoat/Redhat terrorists, who have openly proclaimed their goal of Americans killing Americans in an ideological and racial war, prevail.

Original post: HartmannReport.com

May 1, 2021

The Cautionary Tale of Joe Manchin's Opposition to DC Statehood

Factions have been America’s biggest battle for 240 years, and if we don’t fight hard now, we could lose the whole thing.

This week, President Joe Biden proposed plans to put America back to work, get Americans back to health, and rebuild our nation in a way befitting the greatness of our ideals. He’s also officially announced his support for voting rights and DC statehood.

The right-wingers and two Democrats who oppose him claim that he’s not representing the best interests of America, but instead is working for “Special Interests,” something the Founders of this country referred to as “factions.”

It’s probably the most transparent example of projection we’ve seen in decades.

For the last 40 years, America has been seized and largely controlled by what we would call “special interests” and the Founding Generation called “factions.”

Since the Reagan Revolution, the Republican party has exclusively represented the special interest factions of billionaires and giant corporations who don’t want to spend a penny of their money helping or building this country, but enthusiastically extract labor from our people and cash from our middle class.

Small wonder they’re so violently opposed to President Biden’s initiatives.

And, sadly, it appears that they’ve pulled, bullied or bribed Joe Manchin into their number with his recent statements in favor of the filibuster and against DC statehood. And Kyrsten Sinema with her famous thumbs-down on the $15 minimum wage; it’s definitely not the people of Arizona she’s representing with that position.

Back in 1788, James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” wrote about the danger of the kind of special interests or “factions” we’ve seen seize the GOP and much of our nation over the last 40 years.

“By a faction,” Madison wrote, “I understand a number of citizens…who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” (emphasis mine)

“Adversed” being the word used back at that time to describe what we would mean today if we use the word “opposed.”

Factions, in other words, were groups of people who were openly and nakedly opposed to what was best for the nation. And he saw them as the greatest danger this country faced.

Madison wasn’t talking about an abstraction or some highfalutin concept. He was talking about how some rich people will inevitably try to seize political power to screw everybody else. How, as he wrote, their own personal, selfish “interests” are opposed to the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

“Property” today generally means land, but in 1788 it meant “wealth.” Madison came right out and said, in Federalist 10, that the interests of those with great wealth are typically very different from the interests of average Americans:

“But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”

In fact, he said, one of the most important jobs of government is to prevent its own corruption by these wealthy and powerful factions.

“A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation....”

But what happens when those wealthy interests, the faction of the rich, are given the power by the Supreme Court to own politicians and essentially write their own legislation?

This was Madison‘s nightmare, and it’s the political system the Reagan Revolution and a series of conservative Supreme Court decisions have brought us.

Consider how badly our republic and the functioning of our government have been seized and corrupted by these wealthy “factions” over the last 40 years since the Supreme Court, in 1976 in 1978 (and tripled down with Citizens United in 2010), ruled that billionaires and corporations could openly own politicians and political parties.

Because these right-wing billionaires and giant corporations don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes or decent wages to their workers, our nation’s infrastructure – both physical, intellectual and human, has been in a state of collapse for two generations.

We’re told by Republicans that when workers want to have union representation they’re really just a “special interest” — a greedy “faction.”

They explain to us that scientists trying to save our environment or teachers trying to improve our schools are just greedy “special-interest factions.”

They lecture us at length about the “tyranny of the majority,” saying that although most Americans want a national healthcare system, free college education, and a fair tax system that will revive the American middle-class, we’re just pursuing our own “selfish, socialist agenda.”

They have created literally tens of thousands of websites and phony “publications” to argue their right-wing positions and push back against Americans’ concerns about everything from global warming to factory farming to air and water pollution.

They’ve been so successful at this that even the most benign Internet search typically pulls up mostly-right-wing content in its first 20 results.

The message of these websites, over and over again, is, “What’s best for the billionaires and America’s monopolistic corporations is what’s best for America. When average working people get things from government, that makes them lazy and produces Socialism.”

Madison — and, indeed, virtually the entire Founding Generation, including the half-plus who were not slaveholders — gives the lie to all of it.

As Madison pointed out and Alexander Hamilton amplified, “faction” is a group whose interests are opposed to those of the general public or the welfare of the nation overall.

Faction is poison to the body politic. Faction is a cancer that sucks the life out of democracies.

America is today overwhelmed by factions.

Factions like the billionaires the Supreme Court said could spend unlimited amounts of money buying politicians because all that money is no longer considered “bribery” but instead is “first amendment protected free-speech” under Citizens United.

Like the corporations that send tens of thousands of lobbyists to State capitols and Washington DC to spread around billions of dollars every year to buy the legislation, rules and tax policies they want.

Like the rightwing think-tanks paid for by fossil-fuel billionaires and their friends that fund rightwing professors in our colleges, write our children’s textbooks, and for 40 years have tried to convince us that anything Government does that is good for the average American is actually bad for “freedom.”

And, tragically, those factions have captured a few Democrats, as we see with Joe Manchin pursuing his own agenda instead of what reflects basic American values (DC Statehood & the For The People Act) and what’s best overall for the nation (rebuilding our infrastructure).

As Madison pointed out, a democracy cannot exist when the voice of the people is drowned out by wealthy, self-interested factions.

The Supreme Court brought us this crisis, but President Biden and Congress are today proposing legislation like the For The People Act, that will begin the process of mitigating the damage those conservative justices have done to our nation. And bringing the residents of DC, more populous than Wyoming or Vermont, into full citizenship in our nation is simply the right thing to do.

Rebuilding this country after 40 years of neglect; reclaiming our moral center in the world; and clawing back from the top 1% the trillions of dollars they’ve extracted from the American middle-class since the Reagan Revolution is no small job.

But President Biden and most of the Democrats have signed on for it, and if we are to prevent this country from sliding all the way into an authoritarian oligarchy dominated exclusively by the mutually parasitic factions of right-wing billionaires and the corporations that made them rich, we cannot stand by on the sidelines.

Democracy, as Bernie Sanders loves to say, is not a spectator sport. Tag, you’re it.

Original post: HartmannReport.com

April 30, 2021

You'd have to be abnormal not to have Trump Derangement Syndrome right now

Count America In On "Trump Derangement Syndrome"

Rudy Giuliani and his lawyers are suggesting that the reason a search warrant was issued for his premises and computers is “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Yeah.

A lot of us are suffering from that. It’s normal and predictable. Arguably, it’s a sign of good mental health. It means your psychological alert and defense systems are actually working.

There’s an arsonist and a burglar both actively working the neighborhood just down the street from where we live here in Portland. The arsonist has set several people’s home’s outdoor furniture on fire, and nearly lit up a house.

The burglar has broken into a couple of houses, including one that was occupied, mostly to steal computers, and last week he stole somebody’s car from the driveway of an occupied house just down the street from us. I saw it happen, not realizing what was going on but totally baffled as to why anybody would peel out of a driveway and speed down a residential street at 50 or 60 miles an hour.

At the moment, my neighbors and I are suffering from “arsonist and burglar derangement syndrome.” It’s absolutely normal, when you’re presented with a real threat in your environment, to feel a little “deranged.” We’re staying in closer touch with each other, upgrading security systems, and having more frequent conversations with the police.

(This isn’t unique to Portland, by the way. With a massive unemployment crisis caused by Trump’s criminal response to the coronavirus combined with 40 years of Reaganism gutting the middle class and exacerbating homelessness, every town in America is experiencing a surge in this kind of crime.)

Similarly, it shouldn’t surprise anybody that millions of Americans won’t feel safe, but will continue to feel “deranged,“ until Donald Trump and his authoritarian, democracy-hating, white-supremacist, gun-fetishist followers no longer play any kind of meaningful role on the American political scene and he and his criminal buddies are held to account.

After all, he could’ve responded to the coronavirus back in January when he told Bob Woodward how lethal it was, but he chose not to. It was just too much trouble, plus, as we’ve seen in numerous news reports, he realized in April that it was mostly killing Black people and mostly creating chaos in Blue states.

As a result, over half-a-million Americans are dead; that’s probably a few million American families who are feeling a bit “deranged.” People have lost their parents and grandparents, their children and siblings, their neighbors and loved ones to a disease that could have been controlled here in the United States as it was in Australia, Taiwan and South Korea were it not for an incompetent Con Man in the White House.

Trump nearly started a nuclear war with North Korea, and then went over there a couple of times to kiss one of the most maniacal dictators on Earth’s ass.

He sucked up to the butcher of Saudi Arabia, bragging that he blocked the investigation into the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and thus “saved [Muhammed Bone Saw’s] ass.”

He insisted that America’s own intelligence agencies were lying, and Russia and other countries that were friendly to him could do no wrong.

He and his family expropriated money from pretty much anything that moved, as they’ve had a history of doing for decades.

We’re now discovering massive overpayments to various Trump properties around the world from our federal government; he violated the Emoluments Clause — a core pillar of our constitutional form of government — as if it were some kind of a joke.

He conned his followers out of hundreds of millions of dollars, and continues to con them with the Big Lie that “election fraud” is the reason why Joe Biden is in the White House and Democrats run the Senate.

He surrounded himself with criminals, actual traitors, ne’er-do-wells, and outright grifters.

His guy DeJoy is still bent on destroying our Post Office because Trump thought it would help him win the 2020 election, and ruining and then privatizing it can make big bucks for GOP donors.

He did everything he could to destroy Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid and threw several million people off their insurance coverage. He severely damaged the Social Security Administration.

He tore children apart from their parents, several of those children dying as a result, and cranked up hatred against non-white people to the point that elderly Asians are being assaulted in our streets and other minorities are frightened to go out in public.

He spit in the face of decency and both American tradition and law when he made fun of people with mental and physical disabilities, and explicitly told police that they should “rough up” suspects who are supposed to be presumed innocent until tried and judged guilty.

He referred to actual Nazis as “very fine people,“ and encouraged the politics of fear and hatred as a sick way of enhancing his own political power.

He has repeatedly been charged with assault and rape, and then offered as his defense that the women who accused him weren’t sufficiently attractive for him to have bothered raping.

The women we know for sure he did have extramarital sex with, he paid several hundred thousand dollars to keep quiet, a felonious violation of campaign finance laws that would’ve landed anybody else (and did land his lawyer, Michael Cohen) in prison.

On January 6th he tried to end our democratic republic and turn it into a strongman authoritarian state like Turkey or Russia, leading to the death of four protesters and three police officers.

And so far, he’s been held accountable for none of it, although most Americans are hoping and praying that his apparent immunity will soon end. But, for the moment, the political arsonist and burglar Trump and his grifter family are all still at-large.

You’d have to be abnormal not to have Trump Derangement Syndrome right now.

Original post: HartmannReport.com

April 29, 2021

Dear Sen. Tim Scott - If America Is Not a Racist Nation...

We can’t solve our very real & serious issues if we don’t confront them, and it’s tragic that the GOP would use this national platform to once again deny America's most tragic reality.

President Joe Biden, last night, gave one of the best presidential speeches and policy proposals of my lifetime. It rivals Jack Kennedy in 1961, and, if passed, will undo much of the damage of the Reagan Revolution of the past 40 years.

In the Republican Party’s rebuttal, without seriously addressing even one single specific proposal of President Biden, Senator Tim Scott, the sole Black Republican in that body, instead went out of his way to promote the GOP idea that, in his words, “America is not a racist nation.”

This, of course, is the main GOP sales pitch for blocking and refusing to pass any kind of legislation that might make up for 400 years of violently racist economic, educational and policing policy in the United States.

It’s the rationale Republicans on the Supreme Court used to gut the Voting Rights Act in their Shelby County decision, which led to numerous Republican-controlled states passing racially-specific anti-voting laws within weeks that they continue to promote and expand on to this day.

It would be wonderful if it were true, but tragically is, today, a sad lie and a fantasy.

If America is not a racist nation, why did we kill tens of millions of Native Americans, keep their descendants in poverty, and continue to this day to steal their land?

If we’re not a racist nation, why were most of the iconic buildings in Washington DC, from the Capitol building to the White House, built by enslaved Black people?

If we’re not a racist nation why was it the law in the United States until the 1960s to separate the races and even outlaw interracial marriage?

If we’re not a racist nation why was it the law until that era that immigration had to follow racial patterns with almost exclusively white people legally entering the country? And why is it that Republicans want to go back to those racially-based immigration policies, and keep referring longingly to that pre-1960s period?

If we’re not a racist nation, why is it that Black people are killed disproportionately by police? When was the last time you heard a white guy say, “I can’t breathe” just before he was killed by the police?

If we’re not a racist nation why is it the people with identifiably white and Black names receive different numbers of callbacks from prospective employers across multiple studies over decades? Not to mention the pay differential that’s so well documented?

If we’re not a racist nation, why is the Maga movement almost entirely white and why do they keep talking about starting and winning a “race war“ in the United States?

If we’re not a racist nation, why does the Department of Justice clearly identify the greatest terrorist threat to this country as American white supremacists?

If we’re not a racist nation, why did the President of the United States refer to Nazis chanting that “Jews will not replace us,“ meaning that they thought Jewish billionaire George Soros was importing people of color into the United States to “replace” whites, as “very fine people?”

If we’re not a racist nation, why do schools in predominantly Black neighborhoods consistently perform poorly, even when attended by white students?

If we’re not a racist nation, why is the average white family worth over $100,000 and the average Black family worth less than $6000?

If we’re not a racist nation, why is it that we’re surprised when we see a TV show where the hero is the Black guy and the evil person is the white guy?

If we’re not a racist nation, why do white guys keep walking into churches and shooting Black guys, and white people keep calling the police on Black people for walking, shopping, working, birdwatching, attending school, caring for their own children, or driving?

And when was the last time you heard about white people having the police called on them by Black people and that white person ended up shot dead or had his neck crushed by the cops?

If we’re not a racist nation, then why are our billionaires and business leaders almost entirely white? Why is that also true of the Republican party, both in its base and among its elected officials?

If we’re not a racist nation, then why are Republican politicians in every state they control working as hard as they can to keep Black people from voting?

Eliminating racism as an animating force in the United States is a worthwhile and noble goal. But for a major political party to pretend that we’ve already reached that, solely so they can ignore it as an issue and continue to maintain the racist status quo, is obscene.

We can’t solve our very real and serious issues if we don’t honestly confront them, and it’s tragic that the Republican party would choose to use this platform and opportunity to once again deny simple reality.

Original post: HartmannReport.com

April 28, 2021

Is Tucker Carlson Inciting Racist Police & "Karens" to Harm Minorities?

This latest stunt by Fox News and Tucker Carlson goes way beyond bad taste or a cruel prank. Its intention appears to be to terrify & harm the most powerless in our society.

Bill O’Reilly spent months working to get Dr. George Tiller, calling him “Tiller the Baby Killer” 24 times on the air. His efforts finally succeeded when the abortion doctor was assassinated by a zealot in May of 2009.

In terms of creating chaos, pain and human misery, Tucker Carlson appears to be following in O’Reilly’s footsteps.

It’s the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump deciding that since Covid was mostly killing Black people in Blue states he was going to stop all government efforts to do anything about it.

And it wasn’t just Trump: the entire right wing media and think-tank crowd were in on it that month, as I documented in detail here.

And on this anniversary, it looks like the white supremacist right and their most prominent hero, Tucker Carlson, are trying to do the same thing all over again: Put the lives of as many people of color in jeopardy as possible, while gleefully making life as miserable as they can for them at the same time.

Until a few months ago, conventional wisdom was that “vaccine hesitancy“ was principally an issue in the Black community. There were shows about it, articles about it, and a concerted effort to convince Black people that Tuskegee was another era, medicine was more colorblind, and this vaccine really is what the government says it is.

Turns out the whole effort was unnecessary: Black people have known for a year that the risks of Covid are greater for them, and have been among the most careful in our population when it comes to wearing masks, practicing hygiene and getting vaccinated.

Which means when some ass comes along and says that white Fox News viewers should be calling 911 on people wearing masks, or parents with children wearing masks should be turned over to Child Protective Services, the weight of that state power will fall mostly on Black and Brown people.

If you think Tucker and his friends at Fox News hadn’t figured this out before they began this campaign, I have a bridge to sell you.

While it helped amp-up his sagging ratings and fed the perpetual outrage machine that has become right-wing media, what’s really going on here is that Tucker Carlson and his friends are encouraging a nationwide army of “Karens” to harass minorities who are simply trying to go about their own business and keep themselves and their children safe from a deadly disease.

He actually said, on national television:

“Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart. Call the police immediately, contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse, it’s child abuse and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.”

While police power can be both brutal and deadly, particularly when directed toward Black people in America, the corollary power of Child Protective Services can also be downright terrifying to parents.

Louise and I worked in the field 40 years ago, and, as anybody who knows the system can tell you, the ease and capriciousness with which children can be taken from their parents can be absolutely shocking compared to the due process afforded people in the adult criminal justice system.

Low income parents, and particularly low income Black parents, often live in fear of Child Protective Services. Louise once went to court and got in a rather heated fight with a judge over whether 10- and 12-year-old siblings she represented should be removed from a group home because that facility’s vegetarian diet constituted, in the minds of the social worker and the judge, “child abuse.“ The judge wanted to put the kids in the county’s equivalent of a children’s prison, where they could be brutalized, but at least would get meat.

The system is confusing, opaque, and often is capricious and practically impossible to appeal. It’s one of the most frightening things you can threaten a low-income family with, particularly a family of color who may end up before a white social worker and judge.

And if the family is here without documentation, multiply that fear, terror and risk of being turned in to authorities by 100.

Which is why, of course, right-wingers like Tucker Carlson would encourage their white viewers and listeners to do exactly that.

Hard-right white supremacist commentators also want to make sure that Black and low income parents know that they’re promoting telling their white middle-class viewers to do this: it adds to the terror.

The fear of confronting the state can also change behavior. If Tucker and his white supremacist buddies can frighten enough people of color into not protecting themselves or their children with masks, they can increase the rate at which these “least of the least among us” suffer infection, disability and even death.

That’s a bonus: fewer people of color to “replace” white people…

This latest ratings stunt by Fox News goes way beyond bad taste or a cruel prank. It is a vicious, racist, intentional effort to terrify and harm the most powerless in our society.

It defines the word “reprehensible,” and those who program, promote and sponsor such hateful, petty and barely human behavior share responsibility for its consequences.

Original post: HartmannReport.com

April 27, 2021

The Hidden Secret Behind the Arizona ballot Counting

Republicans are channeling Joseph Stalin who once suggested, “It doesn’t matter who votes; what matters is who counts the votes.”

Lore has it that Joe Stalin once said, “It doesn’t matter who votes; what matters is who counts the votes.” Republicans in Arizona are today engaged in an act of political treachery worthy of Stalin’s quote.

There’s history here.

Grab the nearest Republican and ask them, “How did John Kennedy win the election in 1960?” Most will answer, “Mayor Daley stole the election for him in Chicago.“

Complaining that the only possible way they could’ve lost an election is if the other side cheated is nothing new for the Republican party. The difference between now and 1960, however, is that in 1960 Richard Nixon had the common decency not to promote a Big Lie, and enough concern for his country — he served honorably in uniform, volunteering for sea duty in the Pacific during World War II — to not pit armed Americans against each other.

Today’s Republicans are an entirely different breed. Soulless psychopaths like Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Marjorie Traitor Greene have taken over the party, and drawn to them the fringe psychopathic element that has always been part of American society but has never been so concentrated around one particular issue or ideology.

My dad was a Republican in 1960; I suppose you could say I was, too, because at nine years old I pretty much followed his political leanings.

But he also had a good job because of the machinist’s union, a contract he renegotiated every year on behalf of the tool and die shop where he worked, was a big believer in Social Security, and was proud of the fact that he’d gone to college on the G.I. Bill at no cost. Those were all positions that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and his Vice President Richard Nixon shared with my dad in 1960.

But my dad also introduced me to the psychopaths on the fringe of the GOP, telling me that I needed to know about “people like that.” A guy he knew from the local model railroad club was a member of the Michigan Militia, and they took me to a John Birch society meeting once.

At that meeting, I picked up a copy of John Stormer’s book None Dare Call It Treason, and reading about all the communists who’d taken over the State Department scared the living hell out of me. My dad reassured me that “those [Birch Society] guys are nuts,” and went on to point out that the Dixiecrat racists like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the Democratic Party were worse than anybody in the GOP.

Richard Nixon, in fact, later supported the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and school desegregation, as did my dad. Even Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” which he, Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes hatched later, in 1968, seems tame by comparison to the virulence of today’s Republican racists.

This isn’t to praise Nixon; he was a venal, greedy, corrupt SOB. But he at least had the decency to resign when he got busted.

Republicans today are very, very different; they’re actively doing everything they can to destroy democracy in the United States. In this, they are being cheered on by autocrats around the world, and in many cases assisted by those very autocrats with big bucks and covert efforts on social media, as Robert Mueller found.

With few exceptions, today’s GOP is doing everything it can to tear America apart, pitting us against each other along lines of regionalism, gender, race, religion, education and even the use of American iconography like the flag and the national anthem.

And now they’re even encouraging sickness and death among Americans by trying to discourage us from getting vaccinated, all to prevent President Biden from getting America and the American economy back on track.

That’s pretty bad, but the Big Lie of voter fraud and the “lost cause” of Donald Trump’s 2020 election is the one that will live on for generations.

After all, Jack Kennedy could’ve lost the entire state of Illinois but still would’ve had enough electoral votes (he won 303 to 219) to become president. He didn’t need Chicago. On top of that, Republicans insisted on, and got, two separate audits of the vote in Illinois, one immediately after the election and one in 1961 after Kennedy’s inauguration, and both showed that Kennedy won. But Republicans still think Mayor Daley somehow won the day for JFK. The persistence of political grievance is extraordinary.

Republicans today, however, are trying to set up more than just a myth of political victimhood. They’re trying to destroy faith in America’s core democratic institution of the vote so they can control and manipulate it in the future — to their own benefit — with impunity.

The effort underway with the phony staged “audit” in Arizona will, no doubt, produce “questions” about the election, even though Republican officials in that state supervised three separate and comprehensive audits overseen by the media that found no evidence whatsoever of election-altering fraud.

It will be used to justify increasingly draconian limits on who can vote and increasingly partisan control over which votes are to be counted and which are to be discarded in future elections.

They were willing to overturn the 2020 election: can there be any doubt they are more than willing now to rig future elections?

Thomas Paine once referred to the vote as the “beating heart of democracy.” Republicans are going after it with an ice pick.

This isn’t just a fight for the survival of The Democratic party or even fair and clean elections and functioning politics.

The endgame here, for the Republicans engaging in this vicious attack on our republic, is to end the American experiment and turn us into an authoritarian country that more closely resembles Turkey, Hungary or Russia. (For a deep dive, this is the topic of my most recent book, The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.)

Right now there are only two things standing in their way.

The first is public outrage, which is building but can easily be displaced by a big news event like a disaster, a terrorist act or another Trump-follower attack on the Capitol.

The second is HR1/SB1, the “For The People Act,” which reduces the power of dark money and establishes national standards for clean elections; it has passed the House but is hanging under the hammer of McConnel’s filibuster in the Senate.

In an email I received this week from Freedomworks, the Koch-founded organization that brought us the Tea Party, they bragged about how they helped put Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court:

We Reached over 11 million activists in support of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation. In a matter of only a few weeks, FreedomWorks reached over 9.8 million Americans on Facebook, reached more than 1.4 million on Instagram, generated 500,000 peer-to-peer texts in eight target states, and delivered 49,870 emails to the Senate all in support of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme

Now’s they’re turning their millions and their efforts toward blocking the For The People Act, which they complain, “would also require 501(c)(4) organizations (like FreedomWorks) to expose the names of donors, leaving them vulnerable to the Left’s ‘cancel culture’ mob attacks.”

If we are to succeed in blocking oligarchy and restoring democracy to America, now is the time to call your Senators at 202-224-3121 and let them know you support ending the filibuster and passing the For The People Act.

Original post with links: HartmannReport.com