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