thomhartmann
thomhartmann's JournalToday's Rant: Americans must drive a stake through the heart of the NeoCalvinist Republican Party
Once again, negotiations over Covid relief show the stark differences between the Democratic and Republican Parties. That America isn’t shocked and horrified by GOP behavior is a testimonial to how well corporate media obscures these differences.
Several Republican senators and their aides have gone so far as to suggest that giving working people even a single $600 check will cause them to “live high on the hog“ or will bring “communism“ to America.
The same Republicans are enthusiastic when the very rich, their principal donors, get trillions in tax cuts and hundreds of billions in annual subsidies. When those pieces of legislation are being negotiated, “living high on the hog“ is not a phrase you will hear.
What we’re watching in real time is the worldview promoted by many who share Betsy DeVoss’ Calvinist church’s worldview that being rich is a sign that God has chosen you as a “good person” and wants you to lead the country.
As bizarre as this sounds, it’s actually an ideology that has an animated the Republican Party for over 100 years. If all people, at their core, are sinners and evil, the big question for conservatives is, “How do we find ‘good’ people to lead us?”
Hundreds of years ago, religious leader John Calvin and his followers gave a simple answer: God tells us who should be leading our nation by showering those he favors with great wealth. Thus they should lead us.
The extension of this idea, at the core of conservative thought since the days of Edmund Burke in the era of the American Revolution, has been that poor and working class people are not worthy of leadership because they are not blessed by God with riches.
In the conservative understanding of both religion and a functional social order, only rich people should ever be allowed to rule.
Burke pointed out that while people like hairdressers and candlemakers should be allowed to make a living, they should never be able to vote or participate in government. To this day, Burke is one of the most quoted figures among American conservatives.
While Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, openly worries that giving a $600 check to people already receiving paltry unemployment payments that run out in two weeks would be a “double benefit,“ lines for food are stretching for miles in some parts of the country.
The conservative billionaire class and it’s Republican Party say throwing bones to starving Americans is OK as long as they’re tiny bones. But they want their trillions in tax breaks and subsidies to continue nonstop...and Republicans in Congress are working hard to comply.
Sadly, some Democrats are echoing their, “Oh my God, the deficits!“ rhetoric. By coincidence, they’re the ones whose political campaigns are mostly funded by billionaires and big industry.
This Calvinistic worldview and the massive inequality it’s brought America over the last 40 years is a cancer destroying our republic. It’s made far, far worse by Supreme Court decisions gutting campaign finance laws.
America once had the world’s strongest middle class and widespread social stability. While it didn’t extend to all Americans, we had a formula that worked and needed to be extended. Share the wealth with working people and tax the billionaires at a reasonable, above-50% rate.
40 years of Reaganism has gutted the middle class, wildly enriched the billionaire class and is now destroying the very democracy that generations of Americans fought and died for. We must drive a stake through its heart and and this poisonous ideology altogether.
Mitch McConnell wants to let corporations kill you without consequence
Hey, DU friends, here's today's rant...
Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans without any consequence.
Mitch took you and me hostage back in May, when the House of Representatives passed the HEROES act that would have funded state and local governments and provided unemployed workers with an ongoing weekly payment.
Mitch refused to even allow the Senate to discuss the HEROES Act until or unless the legislation also legalized corporations killing their workers and customers. To this day, he refuses to let it even be discussed in the Senate.
We’ve seen companies fire people for refusing to take their lives in their hands, executives organize betting pools on which employees are going to die first, and companies lying openly to their workers and customers about the dangers of COVID-19.
Mitch McConnell wants to protect them all. Even worse, his immunity can extend well beyond COVID and sets up a process that could put corporations above the law permanently, across every community in America, in ways that state and local governments can never defy.
While Republicans have fought against raising the minimum wage or letting workers unionize for over 100 years, what McConnell is doing now is giving corporations the ultimate right: the right to kill their employees and customers with impunity.
And McConnell’s holding your local police and fire departments, public schools and state healthcare programs hostage in exchange for his corporate immunity.
This is beyond immoral. This is ghastly, and should have been at the top of every news story in America for the past six months. But many of the corporations that are looking forward to complete supremacy over their workers include the giant corporations that own our media.
America has suffered for over 40 years under Reaganism’s neoliberal mantra, picked up from Milton Friedman, that when corporations focus exclusively on profit an “invisible hand“ will guide them to do what’s best for people and communities. It’s a lie.
This is an assault on workers’ rights, but, even greater, it’s a corporate assault on human rights. McConnell is saying that a corporation’s right to kill its workers and customers is more important than the lives of human beings.
As unemployment benefits are running out, evictions loom, small businesses are dying left and right, millions of families have been thrown into crisis and more than 10 million Americans have lost their health insurance, McConnell continues to hold us all hostage.
It’s time to fight back. If corporate media continues to refuse to discuss McConnell’s blackmail, we must individually speak up among friends and communities, and also let our lawmakers know what we think. It’s time to raise some hell.
Democrats must get tough: here's why and how
Rebuilding trust in democracy and our American government requires both holding seditious Republicans accountable and restoring the protective functions of government. Here’s what Democrats must do and why.
The reason tens of millions of Americans don’t believe Joe Biden won the election is a 40-year betrayal of the American public’s trust by Republican politicians, grifters, and con artists exploiting the once-good name of Lincoln‘s Party.
Science, religion, and conspiracy theories are all, essentially the same thing: systems or attempts to explain the unknown, to make sense out of things beyond our senses or immediate, touchable reality. Thus, our vulnerability to con artists like Trump.
It’s impossible for any individual to know or understand everything. We believe electrons make our computers work, but for all but a few scientists who’ve actually seen and measured electrons, it’s only a belief. We must trust their word.
This is why trust is central to science, and why scientific norms and institutions require multiple layers and dimensions of confirmation before things are asserted as true or even probable.
It’s also why trust is so vital for religion, and why we’re so horrified by situations like Jim Jones, Jerry Falwell Jr., and child-abusing priests. To commit to a religion or existential belief system requires trust, and these are all examples of betrayal of that trust.
This is why we’re so vulnerable to con artists like Trump and corrupted institutions like the GOP. Based on trust built by past “good faith” politicians like Eisenhower, in 1980 Reagan began pushing scams like trickle-down and voter suppression. He betrayed our trust.
The average person has no way of knowing if “voter fraud“ is real; science says it’s so rare it’s inconsequential. But for 40 years the GOP has pushed this conspiracy theory to justify blocking tens of millions of Americans’ right to vote. They betray the people’s trust.
The average person can’t confirm the reality of climate change through their own senses, so the GOP has, for 40 years, asserted that this solid but relatively complex and multi-factored science is simply a conspiracy theory. They betray the people’s trust.
Observational economics, a science, shows higher minimum wages, high taxes on corporations and the very rich, and worker protections all strengthen an economy (like 1950-1980). But for 40 years the GOP pushed the opposite as economic science. They betray the public’s trust.
News was once more like science: observations and data points, multiple confirmations, answers to skeptical challenges. Now there’s an entire ecosystem pushing rightwing lies and calling them truth, from Fox News to rightwing radio to Facebook. They betray the public’s trust.
Americans are used to believing that our Presidents speak truth. Ronald Reagan, both George Bush’s and Donald Trump have all lied to use that trust to enrich themselves and their billionaire friends, poison our planet, and enhance their power by turning us against each other.
Most things in our lives rely on trust, from relationships to taking medication to relying on our car’s gas gauge. Trump and the Republican party have exploited our innate instinct and need to trust and turned it against us.
Those who believe the GOP’s lies are their victims just as much as the rest of us who must rely on our nation’s political, economic and social systems. Without trust, none of these systems can work effectively or efficiently for all.
Corrupting these systems, Republicans betrayed our trust and turned our democratic republic to the verge of authoritarian oligarchy. America is not yet irredeemable, but we grow closer with every passing Trump or Trumpy Republican’s proclamation and Fox News cycle.
Which brings us back to the widespread belief that Trump was, to quote Hitler, “stabbed in the back“ by Democratic voter fraud. More than even science or religion, a democratic republican form of government cannot exist without trust.
Every democratic republic that has fallen in the last two thousand years, including the Roman Republic, was first weakened by demagogic politicians sowing distrust in government itself the way Trump and the GOP are doing right now. This is how republics die.
If the Democratic Party doesn’t call this out clearly and without compromise, and impose severe consequences on these seditious traitors, the next Republican president will be even worse.
Congressman Bill Pascrell has offered a starting point: refuse to seat them in Congress. Bar associations must strip them of their law licenses, the media should ignore their bleats, and ongoing GOP voter suppression systems must be dismantled, state by state.
Congress must begin wide scale, comprehensive investigations into crimes committed by the Trump administration and the corruption of Congress by billionaires and their corporations. Citizens United must be overturned. Monopolies must be broken up.
Meanwhile, government must begin to work for the American people. Healthcare and quality education, including college, must become a right. College and medical debt for all Americans must be eliminated: it will cost less then the last two GOP tax cuts for billionaires.
None of these are “radical“ or even “left“ positions: every one is held by advanced democracies around the world, more than half currently run by governments that describe themselves as “conservative.“ Rebuilding trust is the price of the survival of our republic.
It's time to defund the Republican Party
In yesterday‘s rant, I laid out all the reasons why Democrats should put at the top of their priority list “defunding the Republican Party.“ Here’s a little background, and how to do it.
Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party. While the Republican party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions.
So Ronald Reagan, as part of his “Reagan Revolution,“ figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America’s unions. His first shot was to destroy Patco, the air traffic controller‘s union, and he did it in less than a week in August, 1981.
He, with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court than embarked on an eight-year campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus wiping out the Democratic Party’s ability to win elections.
It worked, and by 1992 American union membership, and their ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party had to take money from giant corporations and billionaires to prevail in that election year.
Reagan’s plan not only kneecapped the Democratic Party for the next 40 years, but also changed the party at its core, turning it from LBJ’s Great Society Party into Bill Clinton’s corporate-friendly DLC/New Democrat Party, now in bed with big banks, insurance companies, etc.
If Democrats want to defund the Republican party, which may force it to start focusing on the needs of regular people rather than just billionaires and corporations, there are a few obvious steps they should pursue. They include:
End Red State welfare. Kentucky gets $2.41 for every dollar they send to Washington DC. Most other Red States are similarly “taker“ states, so let’s fight for a law limiting states to no more than $1.50 for every dollar they sent to DC in tax revenues. Call it Welfare Reform!
End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $600 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, and over $1 trillion a year we give to big Pharma, insurance companies (like subsidies for the “Medicare Advantage” scam), and “Big Ag“ support.
End corporate monopolies. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses while rejuvenating local economies. From airlines to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working class Americans and use some of that money to fund the GOP.
Bring back Eisenhower‘s 91% top tax rate. America’s strongest economy was 1950 to 1980, with a top tax rate of 91% to 74%. We built highways, schools, hospitals, and put men on the moon. Reagan cut that to 25%, and the billionaires it produced now pour money into the GOP.
Follow Europe’s example and impose a 1% tax on great fortunes. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year: the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. Billionaires should pay a similar annual tax on their money bins.
End campaign contributions from corporations, end SuperPACs and limit billionaires’ ability to skew our politics. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one.
These simple “Contract with America“ steps, along with restoring the ability of American workers to unionize, will not only revive the Democratic Party, but also restore America to economic greatness and give us a far more honest political system.
How do we deal with a Republican Party that's become a traitor to humanity itself?
Politicians in New York State are discussing making Covid vaccination mandatory, and, predictably, Republican cultists are freaking out. “Freedom!“ they scream as they run around maskless, assaulting their fellow citizens with virus-laden breath.
GOP cultists claim that vaccine manufacturers are participating in mind control experiments and public health measures are “un-American,” while we are dying from the highest rates of Covid infection and death in the developed world.
GOP cultists on the Supreme Court even say the Founders of our republic and the Framers of the Constitution would never go along with preventing churches and synagogues from holding large superspreader events. It’s all a lie.
Just like George Washington signed the first single-payer healthcare legislation – it was to pay for medical care and hospitalization for civilian sailors – he also participated in a mass quarantine event during an epidemic in the summer of 1796.
From 1790 to 1800 Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 recurred in 1796, that city’s government, with the cooperation of George Washington and Congress, ordered a block-by-block evacuation of parts of Philadelphia.
Pretty much every signer of the Declaration and Constitution were still alive, and many were in Congress and on the Supreme Court. All supported the lockdown. Churches not only couldn’t meet: they were closed down entirely for much of the year.
From their bans on teaching sex education and evolution in our schools, to denying climate change, to this latest campaign against public health, Republican’s hatred of science has damaged America’s standing in the world and destroyed the lives of millions.
Thomas Paine, in his time, wrote about “The Age of Reason.“ Today we have “The Age of Intentional Republican Stupidity.“ And they don’t just embrace it for themselves: they are hell-bent on imposing it on every American, from schoolchildren on up.
They’ve rigged elections by making it hard to vote, promoted racial and religious bigotry and violence, destroyed our public school systems, gutted our unions, and rewritten our tax system to screw the middle class.
Since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have damaged America more in 40 years than our worst enemies could have dreamed of accomplishing by invasion, boycott or blockade.
These Republicans are not patriots: they are traitors to reason, science, education, human rights, democracy and now, unbelievably, public health. They are traitors to humanity itself. The only way to deal with a death-dealing cult is to end it. Defund the Republican Party.
McConnell: Let them eat a three-martini lunch
Activism alert for DUers!
Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are proposing to let employers injure or even kill their workers and bring back the three-martini lunch...in exchange for one measly month of extended unemployment benefits.
Senate Republicans are trying to sabotage both the incoming Biden administration and screw working people by refusing to extend expanded unemployment benefits in Mitch McConnell‘s new “stimulus“; it does, however, make it illegal for workers to sue their employers.
It’s been six months since the House of Representatives passed the $3 trillion Heroes act that gave jobless people $600 a week, and more than two months since they passed a slimmed-down $2.2 trillion version that gave only $300 a week. But the GOP said no to both.
Mitch McConnell today proposed a new “stimulus“ bill that gives workers an extra $0 a week (not a typo), would end working people’s right to sue their employers for Covid-related injury or death, and brings back massive tax breaks for big business under the guise of helping restaurants.
Meanwhile, the day after Christmas 12 million Americans will lose their basic unemployment coverage. McConnell and Senate Republicans say they’ll solve this problem by extending those benefits for one whole month.
Republicans have opposed unemployment benefits ever since such payments were first put into law in the 1930s by Franklin Roosevelt. So this isn’t surprising; it’s what Republicans do. But during a pandemic and the Trump Depression, it’s particularly heartless and evil.
More than 20 million Americans’ protection against eviction runs out at the end of this month; McConnell and Senate Republicans refuse to extend that. They also refuse any money at all for police, fire, hospitals and other state and local government functions.
They refuse to extend SNAP benefits for hungry families and children, but give businesspeople a 100% deduction for the “three martini lunch,” something that was tossed out back in 1987 because it was such an absurd subsidy for American fatcats.
Republicans would toss a small bone of support to education and vaccine distribution, but embed a time bomb that will blow up in the face of Joe Biden: they make it illegal for the Treasury Department to help the Fed sustain the economy the way they have since March.
Using their regular bullshit talking point about “stopping fraud by working people” (fraud by fat-cats and corporations is ignored) GOP senators want to make it harder to file for unemployment benefits in every state, further crippling Biden‘s ability to stimulate the economy.
Mitch McConnell and the Republicans in the Senate and House exist only to serve billionaires and the corporations that made them. And billionaires and corporations return the favor: the GOP is almost entirely funded by them.
So it should be no surprise that Republicans repeatedly rejected legislation passed by the House of Representatives that would help average working people, and instead today proposed legislation that primarily helps big corporations and their billionaire owners.
Republican multimillionaires like Mitch McConnell, Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue laugh at the working class suckers who vote for them, while they fly around in private jets and live safely cocooned in their palatial mansions.
Call your members of Congress at 202-224-3121 or reach out by email and social media. Tell them to put the tens of millions of unemployed and hungry people ahead of three-martini lunches and liability limits for meat-packing plants and giant corporations.
Profile Information
Name: Thom HartmannGender: Male
Hometown: Portland, OR
Home country: US
Current location: US
Member since: Mon Nov 6, 2006, 08:54 PM
Number of posts: 3,979