March 21, 2021

It takes a month in Georgia to register to vote, but you can buy a gun for mass murder in 10 minutes

How Institutional Racism & Gun Culture Have Poisoned America

The Massage Parlor murders in Georgia remind us that guns, the South, and racially motivated murders have a long history.

As I lay out in detail in my book The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, the Second Amendment was written the way it was, at the time it was, to guarantee that Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia could maintain their state-based militias, which they explicitly referred to as “Slave Patrols.”

Those Slave Patrols were used for hundreds of years by white people to keep African-Americans under their thumbs, and, after the failure of Reconstruction in the election of 1876, the Klan used guns as readily as they did nooses to terrorize Black people in the South.

Thus it should be no surprise that when a 21-year-old white man in Georgia decided he wanted to murder Asian women, he would stop at a gun shop and walk out minutes later with a 9 mm handgun.

That purchase happened just a few hours before he opened fire. Now Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng are dead, along with Paul Andre Michels and Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz.

I used to live in Georgia, and attended the Georgia Police Academy for a book I was writing the year the Olympics were in Atlanta. When you buy a gun in that state, there are no background checks and no questions asked: all you need is a state-issued ID and either cash or a credit card.

There’s also no waiting period. Thirteen states and Washington DC have waiting periods that run from as little as 3 to as many as 14 days between the time you show up in the store and lay down your ID and money, and the time you can pick up your gun and take it home.

Research published by the National Academy of Sciences found that these waiting periods have a substantial impact on reducing murders committed with guns, averaging around a 17% reduction in gun homicides “avoiding roughly 750 gun homicides per year.”

Instead, as was noted in The Wall Street Journal, “The U.S. represents less than 5% of the 7.3 billion global population but accounted for 31% of global mass shooters during the period from 1966 to 2012, more than any other country…”

America is the only developed nation in the entire world where this sort of thing happens on a daily basis. As the research just mentioned notes: “If the United States could lower its firearm death rate to that of Finland (the high-income country with the second highest rate [in the world]), roughly 20,000 fewer people would die from guns every year.”

But that isn’t happening here because racism and “gun culture“ have both evolved in this country into what are essentially intertwined industries.

Both have their own substantial base of mostly white men, and both racists and gun enthusiasts have numerous and frequently interconnected support groups, secret Facebook groups, and politicians who openly take their side. Both are also profitable for those who trade in them.

Like racial hatred and religion appear to have poisoned this alleged murderer, institutional racism and gun culture have poisoned America itself.

The two combined are so potent that even after mass shootings of children in schools or people attending outdoor concerts, the racist/gun partisans in the US House and Senate prevent any sort of motion toward rational gun control in this country.

It takes a month in Georgia to register to vote, but you can buy a gun in 10 minutes, walk out of the store, and kill somebody as quick as you’d like.

Seriously. The Georgia website for voter registration says, “Please allow the county at least 3 to 4 weeks before contacting your county“ to confirm your voter registration. They have to check you out, after all. This is important stuff, this voting.

But to get a gun that you can use for mass murder? No problem. Just lay down your money and walk away with your weapon.

The reason? Racism.

It’s no coincidence that the laxest gun laws and the most restrictive voting regulations in our country are almost entirely centered in states that were part of the old slave-holding Confederacy.

America has a gun problem and a democracy problem, and both are rooted in white supremacy and racism. Racism keeps guns in people’s hands and homes, and guns are continually used as racist tools of terror.

If we’re to move forward, we must address both.

Original post with hotlinks to sources is here: https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-institutional-racism-and-gun

March 20, 2021

Rand Paul May Be Infecting America with a Brand New COVID Epidemic

Because of Rand Paul and his fellow maskholes, America may be facing an entirely new pandemic, one that can kill you even if you’ve already had Covid.

Probably the most under-reported story of the week, and perhaps of the year, was a comment that Dr. Anthony Fauci made in response to harassment from Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul.

Paul, an entitled, preening ass of the first order, refuses to wear a mask because, he says, he’s already contracted Covid, survived it, and now claims he is immune to the disease. He says people who’ve been vaccinated shouldn’t bother with masks, either.

“You’ve been vaccinated and you parade around in two masks for show. You can’t get it again,” Paul scolded Fauci, who’s been immunized. “There’s virtually 0% chance you’re going to get it and you’re telling people that have had the vaccine who have immunity — you’re defying everything we know about immunity by telling people to wear masks who have been vaccinated.”

Since Paul believes he can’t get Covid, the Senator’s logic goes, why should he bother to wear a mask to protect himself from a disease he can’t get? And since he can’t get Covid again, why should he bother to wear a mask to protect others when he can’t become infected and thus contagious?

It’s actually a pretty reasonable logical position. Unfortunately, Paul hadn’t bothered to check out the science or read the newspapers, particularly out of Europe.

It turns out that even though Paul’s already had Covid, he can get re-infected and infect others — and this goes way beyond the rare cases of “normal” second infections. There’s a brand new version of Covid, so mutated it may eventually be considered an entirely new disease, and it’s ripping through the world.

Keep in mind that Covid is an entirely new disease in the 300,000 year history of the human race. Our immune systems have never seen it before.

We have, in the last 20 years, encountered two other versions of the Corona viruses that also jumped from the wild into humans: the original SARS and MERS. SARS kills about a fifth of the people who get it; MERS kills a little more than a third. And now this one, SARS-COV-2 (aka Covid-19), is mutating.

“In the South African study conducted by [Johnson & Johnson],” Fauci told Paul on live television, “they found that people who were infected with [the] wild type [of Covid, like Paul got] and were exposed to the variant in South Africa, the 351 [variant], it was as if they had never been infected before, they had no protection.”

Let that sink in. No protection. It was a if they had never been infected before.

And, while having formerly had Covid (like Rand Paul) offers no protection against getting sick or even dying from the South African variant, the J&J study in South Africa did show that the vaccine at least cut incidence of illness in the face of it dramatically and pretty much eliminated hospitalization and death.

That vaccine and a new one under development by Novavax appear to offer about 60% protection against this new South African strain, but both also largely eliminate deaths from the disease and radically cut its transmission rate.

Nobody knows for sure how effective the Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZenica vaccines are against the new strain, but it appears they at least offer some immunity — which previously having had Covid, like Rand Paul, does not do.

President Biden jumped on the message immediately, echoing Fauci just hours later.

“In the past weeks we’ve seen increases in cases in several states,” President Biden told the nation after Fauci pointed out Paul’s vapidity. “Scientists have made clear that things may get worse as new variants of this virus spread.”

While the South African variant is just beginning to pop up here in the United States, it appears to be burning through France and parts of continental Europe, causing the UK to consider another lock-down even as their vaccination rates beat the US.

The BBC opened their podcast yesterday with: “The Covid crisis in Europe is getting worse, and quickly.“

That may well mean the world is at the same stage in a brand new pandemic — this time with the South African variant — that we were at with the original “wild” version back in March or April of last year. And that would be a very, very bad thing.

Thursday night President Biden addressed this, saying, “Getting vaccinated is the best thing we can do to fight back against these variants,” adding that we must also all wear masks, even if vaccinated or previously ill, to prevent the variants’ transmission.

Even if a vaccine — any of the vaccines — can’t entirely stop the South African variant, according to Fauci and other scientists it will prevent hospitalizations and deaths. And if people keep wearing face masks, vaccinated or not, previously sick with Covid or not, we can cut the speed and breadth of its transmission across the country.

Republican governors are doing everything they can to sabatoge these efforts by lifting mask mandates and even concealing their own states’ death rates. A new study shows that states with Republican governors have the highest Covid death rates, and if they hold to their science denial, this may be just the beginning of an entirely new horror show. About a quarter of all Republican House members have refused any vaccine.

After Trump’s incompetence killed half a million Americans, a couple dozen Republican governors and the House and Senate colleagues seem enthusiastic about repeating that little trick. Apparently they think if as many people can die on Biden‘s watch as did on Trump’s, history will hold Trump and them harmless. They’re wrong.

Our best hope is that people in those Red states continue doing what so many have done over the past year: ignoring their own governors and GOP representatives, wearing masks and social distancing, and taking advantage of any vaccine available.

As the South African variant is devastating Europe, we are now on the edge of being able to avoid the same fate here, if only Americans will listen to Dr. Fauci and President Biden.

There is hope, and me we may well be approaching the end of this long, dark tunnel.

But to get there, we have to listen to the science and ignore those Republican politicians who are doing everything they can to sabotage the Biden administration and let more Americans die for their own pathetic political gain.

Spread the word, not the variant.

Original post with hyperlinks to sources here: https://hartmannreport.com/p/rand-paul-may-be-infecting-america

March 13, 2021

Why the "Reagan Revolution" Scheme to Gut America's Middle Class is Coming to an End

As we stand on the edge of the end of the Reagan Revolution, an end signaled by one particular phrase in President Biden‘s speech last Thursday night (which I’ll get to in a minute), its really important that Americans understand the backstory.

Reagan and his conservative buddies intentionally gutted the American middle class, but they did so not just out of greed but also with what they thought was a good and noble justification.

As I lay out in more granular detail in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, back in the early 1950s conservative thinker Russell Kirk proposed a startling hypothesis that would fundamentally change our nation and the world.

The American middle-class at that time was growing more rapidly than any middle-class had ever grown in the history of the world, in terms of the number of people in the middle class, the income of those people, and the overall wealth that those people were accumulating. The Middle class was growing in wealth and income back then, in fact, faster than were the top 1%.

Kirk postulated in 1951 that if the middle-class got too wealthy, we would see an absolute collapse of our nation’s social order, producing chaos, riots and possibly even the end of the republic.

The first chapter of his 1951 book, The Conservative Mind, is devoted to Edmund Burke, the British conservative who Thomas Paine visited for two weeks in 1787 on his way to get arrested in the French revolution. Paine was so outraged by Burke’s arguments that he wrote an entire book rebutting them titled The Rights Of Man.

Burke was defending, among other things, Britain’s restrictions on who could vote or participate in politics based on wealth and land ownership, as well as the British maximum wage.

That’s right, maximum wage.

Burke and his contemporaries in the late 1700s believed that if working-class people made too much money, they would challenge the social order and collapse the British form of government. So Parliament passed a law making it illegal for employers to pay people over a certain amount, so as to keep wage earners right at the edge of poverty throughout their lives.

Picking up on this, Kirk’s followers argued that if the American middle-class got too rich there would be similarly dire consequences. Young people would cease to respect their elders, women would stop respecting their husbands, and minorities would begin making outrageous demands and set the country on fire.

When Kirk laid this out in 1951, only a few conservative intellectuals took him seriously. People like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater were electrified by his writings and line of thinking, but Republicans like then-President Dwight Eisenhower said, of people like Kirk and his rich buddies, “Their numbers are negligible and they are stupid.“

And then came the 1960s.

In 1961, the birth control pill was legalized and by 1964 was in widespread use; this helped kick off the modern-day Women’s Liberation Movement, as women, now in control of their reproductive capacity, demanded equality in the workplace. Bra burning became a thing.

By 1967, young people on college campuses we’re also in revolt; the object of their scorn was an illegal war in Vietnam that President Johnson had lied us into. Along with national protest, draft card burning was also a thing.

And throughout that decade African Americans were increasingly demanding an end to police violence and an expansion of Civil Rights. In response to several brutal and well-publicized instances of police violence against Black people in the late 1960s, riots broke out and several of our cities were on fire.

These three movements all hitting America at the same time got the attention of conservatives and Republicans who had previously ignored or even ridiculed Kirk back in the 1950s. Suddenly, he seemed like a prophet.

The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “crisis” these three movements represented was put into place in 1981: the explicit goal of the so-called Reagan Revolution was to take the middle class down a peg and end the protests and social instability.

Their plan was to declare war on labor unions so wages could slide back down again, end free college all across the nation so students would be in fear rather than willing to protest, and increase the penalties Nixon had already put on drugs so they could use those laws against hippy antiwar protesters and Black people.

As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum: “You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“

While it looks from the outside like the singular mission of the Reagan Revolution was simply to help rich people and giant corporations get richer and bigger, the ideologues driving the movement actually believed they were helping to restore safety and stability to the United States, both politically and economically.

The middle class was out of control, they believed, and something had to be done. Looking back at the “solutions” England used around the time of the American Revolution and advocated by Edmund Burke and other conservative thinkers throughout history, they saw a solution to the crisis...that also had the pleasant side effect of helping their biggest donors and thus boosting their political fortunes.

Reagan massively cut taxes on rich people and raise taxes on working-class people 18 times. He put a tax on Social Security income and unemployment income, for example, both of which had previously been tax-free but were exclusively needed and used by middle-class people.

He declared war on labor unions, crushed PATCO in less than a week, and over the next decade the result of his war on labor was that union membership went from about a third of the American workforce when he came into office to around 10% at the end of the Reagan/Bush presidencies. It’s at 6% of the private workforce now.

And, sure enough, Reagan’s doubling-down on the War on Drugs was successful in shattering Black communities, his War on Labor cut average wages by more than half over a couple of decades, and his War on Colleges jacked up the cost of education so high that an entire generation is today saddled with more than $1.5 trillion in student debt that many aren’t willing to jeopardize by “acting up” on campuses.

The key to selling all this to the American people was the idea that government is a remote, evil and incompetent force.

As Reagan told us in his first inaugural, government was not the solution to our problems, but was the problem itself.

He dismissed the idea of service to one’s country and joked that there were really no good people left in government because if they were smart or competent they’d be working in the private sector for a lot more money.

He told us that the nine most frightening words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, billionaires associated with the Republicans built a massive infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets to promote and amplify the message; it so completely swept America that even President Bill Clinton was saying things like, “The era of big government is over,” and “This is the end of welfare as we know it.”

Which brings us to President Joe Biden’s speech.

Probably the most important thing he said in that speech was almost completely ignored by the mainstream American press. It certainly didn’t make a single headline, anywhere.

Yet President Biden had said something that Presidents Clinton and Obama were absolutely unwilling to say, so deeply ingrained was the Reagan orthodoxy about the dangers of “big government” during their presidencies.

President Biden said, “We need to remember the government isn’t some foreign force in a distant capital. No, it’s us. All of us. We, the people.“

This was an all-out declaration of war on the underlying premise of the Reagan Revolution.

Franklin Roosevelt talked about a “mysterious cycle in human events.” He correctly identified the end of the Republican orthodoxy of the 1920s, embodied in the presidencies of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, of deregulation, privatization and tax cuts.

(Warren Harding in 1920 successfully ran for president on two slogans. The first was “A return to normalcy,” which meant dropping the 90% tax bracket that Democratic President Woodrow Wilson had imposed down to 25%, something he did in his first few years in office. The second was, “Less government in business, more business in government.” In other words, deregulate and privatize. These actions, of course, brought us the Great Crash and what was known for a generation as the Republican Great Depression.)

Americans are now watching, for the third time in 30 years, a Democratic president clean up the economic debris of a prior Republican presidency.

They’re starting to figure out that crushing the middle-class didn’t produce prosperity and stability, but instead destroyed tens of millions of people’s lives and dreams.

And they’re seeing the hollowness of the Republican’s promises as we all watch, aghast, as the GOP scrambles to mobilize the remnants of its white racist base, at the same time waging an all-out war on the ability of Black, young and working-class people to vote.

President Biden’s speech was the beginning of the end for the Republicans, although it appears only a few of them realize it. (Marco Rubio is apparently one of those who’ve figured it out: he’s now supporting Amazon workers who want to unionize in Alabama!)

Let’s hope the damage the GOP has done over the last 40 years isn’t so severe that America can’t be brought back from the brink of chaos and desperation.

Hopefully, it’s a new day in America.

Full link at: www.hartmannreport.com

February 26, 2021

There's a Nefarious Plot Underway Around the State of the Union Address

Multiple Republicans, from former NRA spokespersons and rightwing talkshow hosts, to Republican congressional candidates, to the rightwing media are speaking out, loudly, about their concern that Joe Biden has not yet held a State of the Union address.

There are so many demands and tweets that David Badash over at The New Civil Rights Movement compiled a list of some in his article about this topic.

Why, suddenly, are all these right wingers demanding that all the members of the House and Senate, the Vice President and the President all gather together in the Capitol building to hear a speech right away?

Why has this suddenly become such a big issue on the right?

Why is rightwing talk radio talking about it almost nonstop?

After all, the Constitution doesn’t even require the president to give such a speech: Thomas Jefferson used to submit them in writing, and he would know the Framers’ intent.

And the Constitution doesn’t require any particular time or date; it doesn’t even require that they be done annually.

Nonetheless, the clamor for President Joe Biden to convene a Joint Session of Congress to bring all of our federally elected officials together in the Capitol building has gotten so loud that USA Today felt obligated to issue a fact check, explicitly pointing out that there is no set date or even annual requirement for a State of the Union address.

Nonetheless, right wingers are loudly complaining about the lack of a timely State of the Union address. Some suggest that Joe Biden is too weak or frail to pull it off, an apparent attempt to egg him on. Others simply lie and say that it’s required in February but he’s ignoring it.

So why are all these Republicans and right-wingers demanding a State of the Union address as soon as possible?

We may have gotten a clue yesterday when the acting head of the Capitol Police, Yogananda Pittman, told Congress that the same groups who attacked the Capitol on January 6 are very, very, very interested in the State of the Union address.

“We know that members of the militia groups that were present on January 6,” she testified, “have stated their desires that they want to blow up the Capitol and kill as many Members as possible, with a direct nexus to the State of the Union.”

The Confederacy that declared war against America in 1861 was all about using violence to enforce white supremacy. They promoted their “lost cause” fantasy for over 150 years to keep white rule in place in America, particularly across the South.

To this day, white supremacist Republican politicians fight any attempt to improve the lives of their poorest people, from opposing expanding Medicaid to opposing increases in the minimum wage, all because those efforts could benefit Black people.

I just sent off the manuscript for the next book in my hidden history series, The Hidden History of American Healthcare, and in my research found that literally every single effort to provide Americans with a national healthcare system, from the late 19th century right up to the passage of Medicare in 1965, was opposed by white southern conservatives who repeatedly and openly bragged they were against it because they didn’t want any such benefit to go to Black people.

In my first book in the series, The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, I lay out how the Second Amendment was written the way it was, at the time it was, to preserve the slave patrols in Virginia and South Carolina, and the basis of much of today’s “gun culture” is rooted in white rage and white fear.

As I pointed out in The Hidden History of the War On Voting, the 19th century Confederate losers and their white supremacist followers to this day fought and fight every effort to make it easier to vote so they can continue to suppress the Black vote. It’s why several hundred pieces of legislation making it harder to vote have been introduced in over 30 Republican-dominated state legislatures just in the last ten weeks.

Thus, it’s no coincidence that the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6th were carrying Confederate flags along with their Nazi memorabilia and T-shirts proclaiming that “6 million wasn’t enough.”

Americans of good conscience know that Donald Trump’s MAGA movement pretty much begins and ends with white supremacy. From “build a wall” to putting brown children in cages to the “Kung flu” and the “Muslim ban,” virtually everything Donald Trump and his followers have pushed flows back to trashing non-white people.

And the one legislative achievement of Trump’s four years in office was a massive tax cut that almost singularly benefited the very, very rich, who are overwhelmingly white.

Black Capitol Police officers on January 6 were beaten, spit on, and repeatedly called racial slurs by the pro-Trump MAGA crowd who were trying to end America‘s democratic republic and replace it with white supremacist strongman rule.

The belief that only white people should hold power or wealth in the United States has been at the core of “conservative” ideology since our founding. It animated nominations for judicial candidates and senior officials throughout the Trump administration, and continues to be a primary value for the mostly white Republican Party.

Some among them want to continue the work that Tim McVeigh started of tearing down a multiracial, pluralistic America with death and violence; their project is now carried on by readers of The Turner Diaries and followers of social media conspiracy theories.

As I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, there have been two attemps by American oligarchs to overthrow the US government and install authoritarian, white supremacist regimes in its place.

The first culminated in the Civil War; the second happened with an attempted coup against FDR that was interrupted by General Smedley Butler. The first was about 80 years after the founding of our republic; it was followed roughly 80 years later by the attempt on Roosevelt. And now here we are again, 80 years after FDR’s death.

The CPAC conference in DC this weekend is celebrating Trump’s Big Lie that he won the November election.

The Trump coup attempt is ongoing, while multiple Republican elected officials think they can ride this tiger safely. They are wrong.

Qanon conspiracy believers are promoting another “rally” in DC on March 4th, the date they think Donald Trump will be proclaimed “President of the World.” The Trump Hotel in the nation’s Capitol has already raised their room rates for that date in anticipation of a crowd.

And now Capitol Police have intelligence that some Trump followers want to use the State of the Union address to reprise their deadly January 6th attempt to assassinate America’s elected officials, so they can replace them with Trump and whichever cronies he brings along with him.

America is at a point of maximum peril as the Republican Party has almost entirely embraced Trump’s white supremacist ideology and is using his Big Lie to push massive voter suppression, encourage more political violence and end the American experiment.

The remaining Republicans who actually believe in American values must step forward and speak out now, or the window in time and history for their party to return to sanity may close forever.

original URL: https://thomhartmann.medium.com/theres-a-nefarious-plot-underway-around-the-state-of-the-union-address-65173df22c35

February 13, 2021

Did Trump Think His Mob Had Taken Pence Hostage? Was his tweet a call to "take out" Pence?

What if Donald Trump actually hoped that his mob would murder Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi?

What if he believed such a crime would create a crisis big enough to let him declare a state of emergency, shut down the government for a transition period through that emergency, and retain his position as President moving into the new year?

Senator Tommy Tuberville told Politico that he told Trump, “Mr. President, they just took the vice president out, I’ve got to go,” but there’s no indication on the current public record that Trump understood that “they just took the vice president out” meant that Pence had been taken to safety.

“They…just took [him] out” could have been taken by Trump to mean the mob had taken Pence, just as easily as it could mean the Capitol Police had saved Pence from the mob.

It’s entirely possible Trump thought Tuberville was telling him that the mob had just seized Vice President Pence and was hustling him off to the sturdy gallows they’d built on the Capitol lawn.

In fact, Trump almost immediately tweeted, after talking to Tuberville: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify, USA demands the truth!”

That doesn’t sound like Trump’s relieved that Pence was just taken to safety, things would restart, and Joe Biden would be certified as president.

What if Trump believed that Pence had been “neutralized” at that point in the process of counting the electoral votes, that the count was stopped, and that Pence would soon be dead?

Could this tweet have been his call for his allies in Congress, now that the VP was out of the picture and they were in charge, to throw the count back to the House of Representatives, where in the past he had repeatedly asserted (probably correctly) that Republicans there would give him the presidency per the 12th Amendment like in 1876?

If that’s actually what Trump thought was happening, his phone call with Kevin McCarthy makes a lot more sense. McCarthy told Trump that the Capitol had been breached, that Trump’s mob was starting to break into his office, and pleaded with Trump to call off his mob.

Trump told McCarthy that the mob was more concerned about the outcome of the election then was McCarthy himself, something he probably wouldn't say if he thought that Pence had been taken to safety and the process certifying Joe Biden as president would soon resume.

Instead, if he believed that his mob was actually going to succeed at killing Pence and perhaps Pelosi, both his tweet, his comments to McCarthy and his conversation with Tuberville would come from the same piece of cloth: his belief that Pence would soon be dead, government would be paralyzed, and he could declare himself President For Life.

Another question is if Pence’s Secret Service detail had informed Trump’s Secret Service detail that Pence was hiding in a secret room in the Capitol, and they’d told Trump, was Trump’s bizarre tweet an order to the mob to, essentially, “search harder” to find the faithless Pence and take care of him so the vote could be thrown to his allies in the House?

Trump and his acolytes had, after all, on repeated occasions tweeted and liked ads and messages that said Trump would be president for 8, 12, and even 16 or more years.

Trump appointed a new Secretary of Defense immediately after the networks declared he’d lost the election, and that SecDef had issued a memo ordering the National Guard to essentially stand down in the event of violence on January 6th.

Along with numerous others, I wrote at length about this, including the SecDef’s memo forbidding the National Guard from even providing helmets or tear gas to the Capitol Police on January 6th without his specific permission, which he withheld for hour after hour as Pence was being hunted by the mob.

This “unusual” behavior by the Secretary of Defense, along with the troubling possibility that Trump actually intended for Pence to die, should be explored by House Impeachment Managers as well as the current Justice Department.

Original story at: https://thomhartmann.medium.com/did-trump-think-his-mob-had-taken-pence-hostage-dc5969479fc8

January 24, 2021

If America Doesn't Implement the "Buy American" Vision Now, the 21st Century Will Be a Disaster

A technological arms race is underway right now between China, the United States and Western Europe.

The stakes include military superiority, economic prosperity, and the status of being the political and economic system the world wants to emulate.

China’s most urgent priority is to become independent of American technology, as Fareed Zakaria highlighted on his January 24th CNN show.

At the moment, many products manufactured in China require parts from America, including products sold into the domestic Chinese market and equipment used by the Chinese military. They’re throwing massive resources into becoming technologically independent of the United States.

In this, China is simply doing what George Washington and Alexander Hamilton laid out in 1791, and if we don’t get back to that vision quickly, the 21st-century will, indeed, be the “Chinese Century.”

Technological independence and international trade policy are, it turns out, two sides of the same coin.

In 2016, the single topic that most likely propelled Donald Trump to the White House by grabbing voters in Midwestern swing states was “free trade,” as he repeatedly pointed out the stupidity of promoting offshore manufacturing simply to reduce labor expenses.

He promised to bring manufacturing back to America, and voters in the former manufacturing powerhouses of the Midwest bought his sales pitch. (Sadly, he was so incompetent that his efforts actually made things worse.)

​Trump wasn’t the first president to understand the importance of this, however.

​When General Henry Knox rode up to Mount Vernon in the late summer of 1789 to tell George Washington that Congress had just elected him as the first President of the United States, Washington had two requests for his old friend.

First, he asked Knox to let folks know he’d be delayed by a few days because he wanted to say goodbye to his mother, who was elderly and ailing (turned out, it was the last time he saw her alive).

Second, Washington asked General Knox to ride all the way up to Delaware to visit Daniel Hinsdale, a man who’d been manufacturing black-market American-made fine men’s clothing in defiance of British law for several decades. Knox brought to New York (where the swearing-in took place on what is now Wall Street) a fine American-made suit, which Washington proudly wore.

​Thirteen years earlier, British economist Adam Smith had made worldwide headlines with his bestselling 1776 book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, proposing that the main thing that made a country rich was having independence in manufacturing.

​The process of converting raw materials with little value into finished products was, to Smith’s mind, the best and only practical way a nation could grow wealthy without overseas conquest and plunder.

A tree limb in the forest, for example, had no monetary value, but when labor and the tool of a knife were applied to it and it was turned into an axe-handle, it now had a value that could be passed down through the generations — what Smith called wealth....

Entire article here: https://thomhartmann.medium.com/if-america-doesnt-implement-the-buy-american-vision-now-the-21st-century-will-be-the-chinese-de93d02c9557

January 19, 2021

America is facing a "dark money" crisis & the supreme court is about to make it worse

Thanks to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Supreme Court has become a menace, and only Congress and President Biden can fix it.

In 2010 conservatives on the Supreme Court, over the loud and clear objections of members of the moderate and liberal minority, doubled down on earlier suggestions that corporations are not “dead and soulless creations of the law,” as one of America’s first Supreme Court justices called them, but actually “persons” and, as such, have access to those rights we find in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Today’s Supreme Court just chose to hear a new case that may radically expand those “corporate rights” by letting corporations conceal the people funding their actions in the political sphere.

Back in 1907, to stop the Robber Barons of the day from using their massive corporate resources to corrupt politics, Republican President Teddy Roosevelt pushed the Tillman Act through Congress, which made it a federal crime for any corporation to give any kind of money or other support to any candidate for federal office.

It stood for more than a half a century before conservatives on the Supreme Court with their “corporations are persons, my friend“ ideology struck it down.

Now that the Supreme Court has broadly let corporations involve themselves in politics, two very politically active corporations are demanding that they should be able to influence politics and politicians without anybody ever knowing are the actual humans behind their efforts.

These corporations demand the “right” to put forward and sponsor candidates and legislation that will serve their interests without American voters ever realizing that those candidates are actually front men for some of America’s most powerful oligarchs.

Even if other corporations have extensive ties to foreign governments or take most of their money from foreign leaders to whom they may be especially beholden, this case could establish the universal billionaire “right” to own American politicians and push legislation entirely in secret.

This is what it looks like when a democratic republic makes the transition into a full blown Oligarchy, as I outline in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy....

The entire story is here: https://thomhartmann.medium.com/america-is-facing-a-dark-money-crisis-the-supreme-court-is-about-to-make-it-worse-467d79f349a2

January 18, 2021

Trump's Big Lie and truth are in an epic battle for the soul of America

The media must explode this generation's Big Lie: Donald Trump's assertion that he really won the election and "voter fraud" handed a false victory to Joe Biden.

Trump and his handmaids on Fox, et al, have pushed his Big Lie so hard and so far that more than half of Republicans fully believe it -thus some are predictably acting on it, from the January 6th failed coup to armed protests at state capitols all around the nation. As long as they believe the Lie, they're not going to stop or go away.

If our media keeps failing to point out that voter fraud largely doesn't exist in America, and that Biden won by about 7 million votes fair and square, our political crisis will slide from bad to worse, more blood will be shed, and our republic may never recover.

The media must point out the fact that Trump is simply repeating the old fascist Big Lie playbook that, 80 years ago, brought the world to its knees, and nearly shattered our federal government.

They must tell the truth to the two-thirds of Republicans who fully believe the election was stolen by voter fraud.

Trump's Big Lie is now so widely believed among Fox-watching, Limbaugh-listening, Facebook-reading police and military members that the Secret Service is vetting individual soldiers coming into DC for the inauguration out of fear that Big Lie true believers among the National Guard may use their weapons to make a second try at an internal coup or even attempt to assassinate President Biden or Vice President Harris.

Trump brought us this, but it's not new.

Adolf Hitler rolled out his Big Lie at the 1924 Beer Hall Putsch, claiming that Germany didn't actually lose World War I, but that a premature surrender negotiated by Jews and communists prevented Germany's final and inevitable victory.

He fired a shot into the ceiling of a busy Munich beer hall to get everyone's attention, gave a fiery hour-long speech that whipped the crowd into a frenzy, and ordered them to march to the nearby seat of Bavaria's government to invade the building and seize the state. It was the failed coup attempt that landed him in prison.

But even in prison, Hitler continued to preach...

entire story at: https://thomhartmann.medium.com/the-big-lie-and-truth-are-in-an-epic-battle-for-the-soul-of-america-d4cab6b06358

January 17, 2021

America is at a fascist turning point -- and only totally disempowering and humiliating Trump...

will stop it.
Will our leaders and media have the courage to do it?

If Trump isn’t exposed as a weakling fraud, our country dies.

Battle lines are now drawn in neighborhoods, workplaces, and even families, as longtime relationships are torn apart over loyalty to America’s strongman fascist leader, Donald Trump.

The main key to fascism, the one element that shows up in fascist takeovers worldwide and has for a century, is the emergence of a strongman leader who uses age-old aspects of toxic masculinity to draw in and hold his mostly-male followers.

While the ground is typically laid by an economic crisis and political power vacuums, the strongman and his masculinity-based rhetoric and actions are key to the movement really taking off.

Whether it’s the fascism of the 1930s with its well-remembered Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, or the fascism of Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Bin Salman or Donald Trump, the key that turns on the takeover is a strongman leader who promotes a macho values set and remaking of society in a brutal and predictable way.

When we think of authoritarians, we typically think of men like just mentioned. But the majority of authoritarian-leaning people in society aren’t authoritarian leaders, they’re authoritarian followers. Science says they’re about 20 percent of any population.

While such followers may project their authority and compensatory “strength” by brutalizing their families or, when given legal authority like joining a police force or running a business, brutalizing their community or employees, at their core they’re longing for an authoritarian leader they can follow in the way the knights of legend swore “loyalty to the death” to King Arthur.

The attraction to the strongman comes from his projection of masculinity, which draws authoritarian follower-types like a magnet...

Entire story at https://thomhartmann.medium.com/america-is-at-a-fascist-turning-point-and-only-totally-disempowering-and-humiliating-trump-will-9106154de199

January 16, 2021

Shameless Radical Religious Leaders Have Corrupted Government: It's time to cut them off...

It’s time for average Americans to stop being forced to subsidize politically radical religious leaders.

Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and heir to the multimillion-dollar Graham fortune, just publicly said that the 10 Republicans voting to impeach Donald Trump and the US House of Representatives were like Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.

“And these ten, from [Trump’s] own party, joined in the feeding frenzy,” he wrote. “It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal.”

Franklin Graham is a multimillionaire in large part because neither he nor his family have to pay any taxes on their family’s business’ income or even pay property taxes on the land and buildings their business owns.

Instead, you and I and the taxpayers of his town and state pay extra taxes to subsidize him and his “ministry.”

Back in the 1950s, the John Birch Society put up billboards all across America demanding that Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren be impeached because he’d signed off on the Brown v Board decision that required schools be racially integrated.

White churches across the country, along with wealthy industrialists like Fred Koch, helped fund the effort, arguing that school integration was the first step to full-blown to communism in America. ...

Entire article: https://thomhartmann.medium.com/shameless-radical-religious-leaders-have-now-corrupted-government-24949ae0bfa8