March 31, 2021

Call Them "Right to Life" or "Freedom" Passports!

Marjorie Taylor Greene is characterizing vaccine passports as “Joe Biden‘s mark of the beast,” so they must have some value. But we have to come up with a different name for them if we’re going to get the conspiracy nuts…er…Republicans on board.

And that includes rightwing media. The headline in The Washington Post sums up today’s health crisis: “The Dangerous Game [Fox News’] Tucker Carlson is Playing on Vaccines.”

If our country is going to “open up” again in a way that preserves the lives and liberty of millions of Americans who’ve stayed virus-free so far, we’re going to have to confront the GOP death cult, head-on. “Freedom” shouldn’t mean the right to force other people to die all alone in a hospital ICU hooked up to breathing tubes.

Airlines, retail stores, restaurants and bars, workplaces, office buildings, colleges, stadiums, theaters, you-name-it — all will have to start exercising their Supreme Court-certified “right” to the “freedom” to prevent un-vaccinated people from entering their premises.

That sweet new Ad Council “It’s Up To You” campaign won’t be enough. Too many Republicans have taken in Donald Trump’s lies and Qanon’s bizarre conspiracy theories to be influenced by sweet pictures and nice words.

Fully 59% of registered Texas Republicans say they have “doubts,” and about half of all Republicans in Congress — where the vaccine is, daily, freely and easily available on demand — have chose not to get vaccinated.

America’s venues have to kick some ass to save lives and rebuild our economy. It’s going to take both the carrot and the stick.

I got my first vaccine passport in 1979 when I traveled to Kenya, Uganda and had an onward ticket to Somalia on behalf of the Salem international relief organization.

To get on a plane to those countries, and then to get through their own passport control, I had to prove that I was immunized against cholera, yellow fever and typhoid, as I recall, and there might of been a few others; I remember the shots hurt like hell and made me sick as a dog for a day or two.

But that yellow card, with the proof of vaccination stamps in it, periodically updated, sat inside my passport for the next 20 years and not only got me into multiple Third World countries on three continents, but also got me through US border stations and back into the United States from them.

The idea of vaccine passports is nothing new.

Although my kids didn’t need them to get into school 40 years ago (the schools just took your word for it), my grandchildren do today. There’s pretty much not a school or summer camp in America that’ll let a kid in without proof of vaccination against, at least, measles and a few other childhood diseases.

Right now the Biden administration is reportedly working with 17 different organizations and private companies to come up with some sort of vaccine passport that’ll work for America, which is apparently why Newsmax’s White House Correspondent calls the idea “totalitarian communism.”

Want to “own the cons”? Put photos on the passports and require states to allow them as voter ID. But, seriously…

IATA, the International Air Transport Association, which licensed the travel agency Louise and I owned in the 1980s and oversees international travel, is working on one, as is the office of World Tourism with the United Nations. IBM is developing a digital vaccine passport, and Clear, the company that speeds you through airport security lines, has already announced that they, too, will soon have one.

Israel rolled them out last month, and Denmark has announced they’ll soon be doing the same.

The way to sell these freedom passports to right wingers is pretty straightforward: tell them it’s the free market, and that it has to do with religious liberty. They love those words even when they don’t know what they mean.

These are the same people, of course, who want a business to refuse an LGBTQ person the freedom to patronize that company based on who they are or love. If conservatives believe an American business must legally be able make a decision like that, why shouldn’t companies have the freedom to refuse service to someone who may be spreading a deadly disease?

Doesn’t “freedom” include the freedom to stay alive in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century?

Freedom is a much misused word. How is it that anybody can say with a straight face that person “A” should have the “freedom” to refuse a vaccine or wear a mask and spread a deadly disease in the direction of person “B,” but that person “B” shouldn’t have the freedom to remain free of illness?

It’s a good argument for calling them “Freedom Passports.”

For that matter, vaccine passports are the ultimate statement of belief in the sanctity of human life.

It’s truly bizarre that legislators in Arkansas and Texas think a woman who wants to get an abortion should go to prison or even get the death penalty, but if a red-state Republican wants to breathe a deadly disease in your face because they’ve joined an anti-mask, anti-vaccine cult, that’s just fine.

Maybe we should call them “Right To Life Passports.”

Crazed Republican conspiracy-mongers aside, the main international objection to vaccine passports comes from groups and organizations concerned about increasing the gap around the world between the haves and the have-nots. One billion people in the world don’t even have proof of identity, much less a passport or birth certificate, and this would leave them even farther out of the loop.

On the other hand, those are not generally the folks trying to get into the Super Bowl, your local supermarket or wanting to sit next to you on a flight from Omaha to Cincinnati.

Back in the 1980s, restaurants around the country experimented with being all non-smoking, or having well-spaced smoking sections with separate ventilation. Restaurants today could do something similar.

The taco place down the street might only let you in with a vaccine passport, a modern-day variation on the “no shoes, no shirt, no service” slogan. Farther down the block, the burger joint may opt to ignore the passports and run at 1/3 capacity or even throw caution to the wind and pack the place in.

Nobody, at least so far, is arguing passports should be required by the gummint the way those communist driver’s licenses are issued and required to speed down the highway. Although I disagree with President Biden on this issue, it looks like it’s going to be entirely up to the “free market.”

The NFL has already weighed in, promoting vaccination among their fans so people can show up knowing that Covid isn’t floating around inside the stadium.

Meanwhile, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, arguably responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths (that he appears to be hiding), is swearing that he’ll never allow a private business in his state to require a vaccine passport for service.

He’s fine with Florida businesses refusing to do business with LGBTQ folks, but Republican cult members who refuse to get vaccinated because they’re convinced Bill Gates is gonna chip them so they can be tracked? No way! (Don’t tell them about that GPS thing in their cell phones, please; they may not be able to handle it.)

As Republican politicians, judges and lawyers constantly repeat, private business should be able to refuse service to people on their “deeply held beliefs.” This one’s gone all the way up to the Supreme Court, and repeatedly gotten the Republican seal of approval.

And, even for them, Freedom Passports could encompass it all: Freedom! America! The Free Market! Saving innocent lives!

What red blooded, Nazi-arm-band-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving, Capitol-invading, gun-toting American patriot could possibly object?

Original post with links: https://hartmannreport.com/p/call-them-right-to-life-or-freedom

March 30, 2021

"Trumpism" Is Simply White Supremacy

If you run a search on “What is Trumpism?” a wide variety of answers and theories pop up.

Wikipedia suggests it is “a term for the political ideology, style of governance, political movement and set of mechanisms for acquiring and keeping power that are associated with Donald Trump, and his political base.“

The BBC quotes a Republican analyst as saying Trumpism is, “What the president believes on any particular moment on any particular day about any particular subject.“

The Atlantic argues its, “A populous prototype, a personality cult, or something stranger.“

The answer, however, is very straightforward and all you need do is look at Trump’s policies, history and statements.

Trumpism is white supremacy.

And while white supremacy has been a “feature” of many movements over the centuries, from the Doctrine of Discovery to Nazi-era fascism, it’s also it’s own standalone ideology.

Donald Trump‘s incarnation as a Republican in the modern era, what led him straight to running in the Republican primary, was often called “birtherism.“

This was the theory, whose principal and most high profile advocate was Donald Trump, that Americas first Black president couldn’t possibly have been born in this country, because, in Donald Trump‘s mind and those of his white supremacist followers, no American Black man could be that smart, articulate or politically savvy.

Obama must’ve been a Muslim Trojan horse, Trump supporters said, a cleverly installed plant, sent here by China or Kenya to bring America to its knees. The headline in the Chicago Tribune summed it up: Obama Faces Vile Insults Like No Other President Has, and chief among Obama’s antagonists was Trump.

Prior to being politically famous for birtherism, Donald Trump made his chops in New York politics by running a full page ad in The New York Times calling for the death penalty for five innocent young Black men who were falsely accused of beating and raping a white woman in Central Park.

Even though they were exonerated by DNA and the actual perpetrator was captured, confessed and already imprisoned for another, similar crime, Trump continues to this day to insist that they should be put to death. They’ve got to be guilty of something terrible, right? They’re Black!

There is literally an entire, lengthy wikipedia page dedicated to the racist comments by Trump. Even newspapers in other countries get it.

Donald Trump learned white supremacy at his father’s knee.

As a young man working in his dad‘s real estate empire, one of young Trump family member’s jobs was to put the letter C for Colored on rental applications from Black people so they could get the phone call that, “So sorry, but the apartment has just been rented out to somebody else.”

As former Trump Organization senior executive John O’Donnell notes in his book Trumped, Donald told him, “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”

In 1989 Trump offered a positively Limbaughian observation about the white freak-out then going on around affirmative action programs: “A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. ... I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage.’’

In 1990, he noted, “Laziness is a trait in blacks.”

He kicked off his primary campaign by characterizing brown-skinned Mexicans as rapists and murderers who, he said, were bringing crime and disease into America.

When an American-born (Indiana) judge who is ethnically Hispanic convicted Trump for committing a massive fraud on thousands of Americans in the Trump University case, Trump referred to him as a “Mexican judge.“ He’s got brown skin: case closed.

In Charlottesville, Nazis and white supremacists were marching in response to a widespread meme on social media that Jewish Billionaire George Soros was financing abortion and homosexuality among white people to reduce white numbers and replace whites with darker-skinned people. There’s an entire international movement promoting this “Great Replacement theory” that they say includes everything from birth control to immigration to affirmative action.

The theory has been implicitly endorsed by rightwing media and Trump for years. Thus, “Jews will not replace us” was their chant. These marchers/murderers of Heather Heyer were, according to Donald Trump, “very fine people.”

He called African countries “shithole countries,” and when he later denied it, Senator Dick Durban — who was in the meeting with Trump where he made the comment — said about his denial, “It’s not true. He said these hate-filled things. And he said them repeatedly.”

Trump, for his part, said he wasn’t opposed to immigration generally, he just wanted more people from “Norway” instead of “shithole countries.” His actual quote was: “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re shithole countries … We should have more people from Norway.”

Trump publicly told several Black and Latinx congresswomen to go back to where they came from. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez replied on twitter, “When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again.”

When asked to simply and publicly denounce white supremacy and racism in his first debate with Joe Biden, Trump refused with his famous “stand by” comment to one of the nation’s more high-visibility white supremacist groups. “But I'll tell you what,” he told the moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace. “Somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left.” Yep, that’s his solution for solving racism in America: “do something” about “the left.”

Donald Trump is the man George Wallace hoped he could one day become. He rode the train of white supremacy all the way to the White House, something Wallace only dreamed of.

While Nixon and Reagan both had a long history of making racist comments in private, and were perfectly willing, as was the elder George Bush, to use racist appeals to gain the White House, there’s little evidence that the fires of white supremacy burned as hot and deep in their bellies as they do in Donald Trump‘s. It was peripheral, not central to their core identities.

For Trump, though, it’s a religion, a mantra, a catechism.

Virtually every person he appointed throughout his presidency, from federal judges to officials up and down the various government agencies he had control over, were white (and most men). The occasional Black person he did appoint had to first publicly demonstrate, after being attacked by Trump, their fealty and obeisance to Trump, certifying in his mind that they “knew their place” and could be trusted not to challenge his white supremacist rhetoric and policies.

And his white supremacist followers are right there with him.

During the treasonous January 6th attack on our Capitol by Trump’s white supremacist followers, every Black police officer willing to talk with the media recounted how they were repeatedly called the N-word. Some of those traitors called for the Black officers to be lynched (and they’d brought a gallows with them, although it’s intended target was apparently Mike Pence).

Among Trump’s political lapdogs, Senator Lindsey Graham just publicly spoke about how if the power ever went out in his neighborhood and the “gangs” started ravishing his neighbors, they couldn’t get him because he has an AR-15. “Gangs” of course, has long been white supremacist shorthand for any number of Black or Latinx people greater than three or four.

Trump’s two “accomplishments” as president were to give a massive, trillion-dollar tax break to almost-exclusively-white billionaires, and siphon money away from GI housing repairs to build a wall to keep out brown-skinned refugees.

Most white Americans have, at one time or another in their lives, known somebody who was a fulminating white supremacist like Trump. People who love to use the N-word and rail against affirmative action and blame their problems in life on folks who aren’t white.

Which makes it all the more curious that our mostly-white media so rarely identifies this singular touchstone of his cult.

Instead, they desperately look for other labels. Populist. Demagogue. Conservative. Movement-driven.

The simple truth is that Donald Trump — and his followers — are white supremacists.

It’s about time we - and the media - started saying it out loud.

Original post with links to sources here: HartmannReport.com

March 29, 2021

Will America Hold Trump & His Enablers Accountable for 400,000 Unnecessary Deaths?

Dr. Deborah Birx is trying to clean up her reputation by telling the story of how Trump was ignoring the science and pressuring her to instead promote his “open the country” policy that killed so many Americans.

But we don’t have to listen to her; Trump, himself, bragged on Fox News that when Dr. Fauci gave him advice on how to save American lives, he “was doing the opposite of what he [Fauci] was saying.”

The scientific research is in, and at a conference convened by the Brookings Institution it’s being reported that Donald Trump’s criminally incompetent bungling of the coronavirus pandemic killed 400,000 Americans who didn’t have to die. Oh, and we could have saved billions of dollars had it been done right.

Reuters summed it up in the first paragraph of their story: “The United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it.”

One researcher presenting at the conference, an economist with UCLA, noted, as Reuters reported, that “if by last May the country had adopted widespread mask, social distancing, and testing protocols while awaiting a vaccine” we could have saved 400,000 Americans from death. And that doesn’t begin to count the serious illness, damage to families and businesses, and long-term disabilities.

When is this man going to be held accountable?

After Pearl Harbor Republicans were all in a froth, suggesting that FDR knew the Japanese planes were on their way and let it happen anyway so he could get us into a war to help his reelection prospects. It was a widely held article of faith among Republicans of a certain age; my dad believed it to the day he died.

But they also held President Franklin Roosevelt to account. Republican uber-conservative and Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts headed up the Roberts Commission to investigate who was responsible for the intelligence failures on that terrible day. They ultimately cleared FDR, instead laying the blame with Navy Admiral Husband E. Kimmel and Army General Walter Short, the two men on command at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

When they think a Democrat might be to blame, Republicans are all about accountability.

Although the George W. Bush administration used private servers to conduct government business for eight years, and then deleted over 22 million emails as they were leaving office, when it was discovered that Hillary Clinton had a private email server for her personal email use when she was President Obama’s Secretary of State, the Republicans went insane. The investigations into her “missing” 30,000 personal emails covered three years, and cost our country tens of millions of dollars. In the end, she was cleared of all the charges.

But, the GOP had already decided, Hillary had to be accountability for something!

So when four Americans died at Benghazi, in the years after the State Department’s requests for extra funds to harden that station and others like it were turned down by Republicans in Congress who said it would represent too much “big government spending,” the GOP decided that Hillary Clinton was at fault.

It was accountability time!

Clinton was the subject of multiple Congressional hearings, examined by private investigators and federal prosecutors, endured hours of testimony before Congress, and a thorough raking over the coals in conservative media for years.

Again, Hillary was found not culpable for any part of that tragedy, although she took responsibility for it happening on her watch, but the Republicans sure portrayed themselves as the ultimate American champions of accountability.

Republicans were even serious about holding Richard Nixon accountable, once there was clear evidence of his crimes. It wasn’t a group of Democratic senators who walked over to the White House one afternoon to inform Richard Nixon that his time was up and he would have to leave office: it was a group of Republicans, led by Senator Barry Goldwater.

Accountability.

Now we have a Republican former president who independent and impartial scientists say made decisions (I would argue politically motivated decisions) that cost the lives of 400,000 Americans. While New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea (among dozens of others) only suffered minor fatalities, America, with 4% of the worlds population, has about 20% of all the deaths from Covid in the world.

And, the researchers say, it’s all because Trump ignored the science. Instead, he chose to do what he thought would get him reelected while pandering to his fat-cat corporate buddies who wanted their front-line workers to show up and keep the money flowing, no matter what.

So when is somebody going to seriously investigate what happened during the Trump presidency?

When is somebody going to look into why his administration was actually planning to do something about Covid prior to April 7th, but in the week following that day – the day the news broke in all the major media that Covid was disproportionately killing Black people and was then only widespread in Democratic-run states – they turned on a dime and decided to do nothing?

Why did Trump, after April 7th, start lying about how serious Covid was and pushing to reopen the country?

Why did Trump lean on Republican politicians and governors to keep their states’ open, producing super-spreader events like the motorcycle rally in South Dakota that GOP Governor Kristi Noem encouraged that led to 260,000 new Covid cases, and deaths across America?

Over a half-million Americans have died, and the science indicates that 400,000 of them died because Donald Trump was a blustering, incompetent, racist, narcissistic, greedy, politically motivated ass.

America is grieving the loss of these people. Friends, family, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, grandparents, even some children.

But, as any prosecutor will tell you in any routine murder case, grieving requires closure, and closure requires accountability.

This is, at the very least, manslaughter, particularly when you consider how he now brags that he actively ignored the scientific evidence and advice.

When will America hold Donald Trump and the people who surrounded and enabled him accountable?

Original link with embedded links to sources and details are here: HartmannReport.com

March 27, 2021

To Save the World, End the Filibuster

The filibuster is not just helping authoritarians damage democracy; it's endangering all life on planet Earth, including the future of the human species

Most of the discussion around ending the Republican Party‘s ability to block any kind of progress in America by using the filibuster has centered on the success or failure of individual Biden-era policies.

Things like legally reaffirming the right to vote. Lowering the eligibility age for Medicare or Social Security. Raising taxes on the wealthy and strengthening the social safety net. Dealing with homelessness, poverty and hunger in the United States.

All these are good reasons to end the filibuster so our country can get on with doing something about the many problems that have festered over the past 40 years while the GOP has held us stuck in Reaganomics austerity.

But none of those reasons to end the filibuster are as important as ensuring the survival of the human race and the rest of complex life on Earth.

More than three-fourths of all the ice-free land on our planet has been substantially altered by humans and we now consume 90% of what’s called “terrestrial net primary production.”

That means, essentially, that 90% of all the “food” on the planet, consumed by every other life-form, has been either appropriated or destroyed by humans, and all other life on Earth must struggle and fight it out for the 10% we’ve left behind. Every day, species lose that battle and go extinct, a process this planet hasn’t seen at this scale in tens of millions of years.

We are eliminating nature.

If you add up the weight of all the mammals on earth, 96% of that weight is humans and our livestock; wild mammals represent only 4% of it. Our domesticated birds exceed the weight of wild birds by 300%.

The total weight of everything that humans have made in the past few hundred years — our homes, our buildings, our cars, everything — is greater than the weight of all living things on Earth. We’re like massive termites, converting everything on Earth into giant human-stuff Australian-style termite mounds.

Even our “border crisis” is, in part, being driven by climate change pushing Central American subsistence farmers off their land as drought turns farmland into scrub desert.

We’re altering our atmosphere in ways that haven’t been seen for millions of years, long before the emergence of humanity. As the planet’s systems catch up with our dramatic increases in greenhouse gases, the next generation of humans will witness cataclysmic changes never seen in human memory even if we were to stop the pollution now, today.

Over half of all the energy that humans use is devoted to heating buildings and moving us and the products we make/use.

About a quarter of our emissions come from the way we produce food, a system now dominated by a handful of massive corporations driving agricultural processes that are destroying our land, wiping out the world’s forests and poisoning our ecosystems.

In every regard, at every level, somebody is making money off all this. A lot of money.

And since the US Supreme Court legalized political bribery with their 2010 Citizens United decision, those moneymakers have purchased the entire Republican Party and a few of the Democrats, as well.

Nonetheless, most Democrats are committed to doing something about these problems. And the Congressional Progressive Caucus is leading the charge.

They want to get America off our addiction to fossil fuels, while building new energy, transportation and agricultural systems that don’t contribute as severely to the destruction of our biosphere…or may even remediate much of the damage we’ve done.

Albeit imperfect, legislation to solve many of these problems has passed the House of Representatives or is being prepared for introduction now. In the past 40 years, however, bills like these die in the US Senate where a handful of Republicans, on the take from various industries, use the filibuster to kill any forward momentum.

The filibuster, a relic of John C. Calhoun‘s slaveholding South, up until 1964 was used exclusively to block Civil Rights legislation. Now, bought-off Republicans use it to maintain the profits of destructive, polluting industries and the billionaires those industries produce.

And they’re preparing to use it again, only this time to stop legislation that may actually help save the planet. In addition, of course, to blocking any forward movement on civil rights, voting rights, healthcare, education, debt, income inequality, homelessness or any of the other crises America faces as a result of 40 years of Reaganism.

If we are to save our country, and become a leader for positive change to preserve our planet, we must end or radically reinvent the filibuster.

The original post of my "daily rant," including links to sources is at HartmannReport.com

March 26, 2021

Georgians Are Waking Up To Governor Kemp's Authoritarian Takeover

In light of what Georgia’s legislature and Governor Brian Kemp just did to crush democracy in that state, you will want to read what a brilliant reporter wrote in the 1950s about how the Nazis took over Germany. It illustrates what the GOP is doing with vivid detail.

The Nazis corrupted the political system and took it over, bit by bit, gradually drawing the people along with them, and packing the courts with partisans in a way that was shockingly banal and totally resonant with today.

And then, in a relative instant, they changed the laws so it was all irreversible.

You can draw a straight line from Reagan through Bush to Trump, and then to Georgia and Iowa outlawing democracy in their states this past week. We’re watching democracy ripped right out from under us.

This was Chicago reporter Milton Mayer's great fear and great fascination, after he got to know real Germans who’d lived through the years of the Nazis.

An American Jew of German ancestry, and a brilliant writer, Mayer went to Germany 7 years after Hitler's fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.

His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined through it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.

In Georgia yesterday a voter suppression bill was passed that functionally hands to the Georgia legislature the power to decide who won elections in that state, regardless of how the vote turned out.

It was introduced into the House, passed the House; introduced into the Senate, passed the Senate; sent to the Governor and signed by Governor Brian Kemp…all in less than one day.

Mayer quotes one of his German friends as describing a similar process:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....

Consider how Brian Kemp became governor.

As Secretary of State in 2018, he did what Jeb Bush ordered SoS Kathrine Harris to do in Florida in 2000, purging hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters from the voting rolls, including massive numbers of African Americans (as documented in granular detail in my book The Hidden History of the War On Voting).

When Stacy Abrams ran against him for Governor in the election of 2018, the group she ran registered over 53,000 Black people to vote.

Then-Secretary of State Kemp refused to process those registrations before the day of his own race for governor when he ran against Abrams. He “won” the Governor’s seat by just over fifty thousand votes.

Democracy in Georgia was crippled by Kemp’s actions, even before he yesterday outlawed Democrats running their own precincts to keep voting lines short, and criminalized giving water to 90-year-olds standing in lines Republicans configure to last for 8 or more hours.

The German survivor continues, as if he’d been living in Georgia or Iowa or Wisconsin for the past decade:

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it - please try to believe me - unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.

One day it is over his head.

A week ago, we all thought we had a fine constitutional republic that had just been battered a little bit by a crazy billionaire con man.

Today, we’re discovering that throughout the past five years — and really since 2001 with Bush’s PATRIOT Act/torture/war/wiretap response to 9/11 — we’ve been incrementally changing our country with every Republican administration, particularly at the state level, and most Americans didn’t even realize it.

And then, Brian Kemp signs a one-day-to-pass piece of legislation that guts democracy in Georgia and the GOP announces they’re going to push other states to do the same, and we suddenly realize that while everything still looks the same, in reality everything has truly and deeply changed.

We are farther along in the process than most Americans understand. America has now sunk so low in the rankings of democratic nations because of the way Republicans have rigged state governments and use the filibuster in the US Senate that we are as dysfunctional as Argentina or Hungary.

This, Mayer’s German informant suggests, is how fascism will always take over a nation.

You see, one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? - Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

During this time of genuine crisis, the worst pandemic in a century made worse (perhaps intentionally) by Trump’s response to it, Americans are paying far more attention to keeping their jobs and avoiding illness than what’s going on in state capitols where they don’t even know the names of their own state representatives and senators.

Thus came the final opportunity for genuine fascists like Kemp to move and move quickly.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there will be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You're an alarmist.’

Yesterday Georgia State Representative Park Cannon, a Black woman and elected legislator, was arrested for knocking on Governor Kemp’s door while he was signing the “Gutting Democracy” bill in a televised but closed-door event. She was the only person in the State of Georgia who took such an action.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked - if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.

We can’t say we weren’t warned.

In a speech that was hysterically criticized by Republicans, President Obama in December of 2017 came right out and said it: "You have to tend to this garden of democracy, otherwise things can fall apart fairly quickly. And we've seen societies where that happens.”

Yes, the former President of the United States was invoked Nazi Germany three years ago while Donald Trump was President, adding:

“Now, presumably, there was a ballroom in Vienna in the late 1920s or ’30s that looked and seemed as if it ― filled with the music and art and literature and the science that was emerging ― would continue into perpetuity.

“And then,” President Obama said, “60 million people died. And the entire world was plunged into chaos.”

The warnings have been there all along. I wrote of this in 2005, quoting Mayer and going off on Bush and the PATRIOT Act as the prequel to fascism.

Americans have been shouting about it lately, in venues like The New York Times and Madeline Albright’s book and from legislators like Alexandria Ocazio-Cortez. Back to Mayer’s German friend in 1954:

But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jew swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.

People in Georgia are waking up today to a different state.

They will no longer be able to know their voices and attempts to vote will actually decide who is their governor, their attorney general, their secretary of state.

They can be purged from the voting rules on a whim, Republicans can take over their precincts and run them under whatever rules they want, and when the GOP inflicts 10-hour lines to vote on them, you now go to jail if you bring them water.

They’ll no longer know their vote for president will count; whenever the vote is close or there’s a controversy, those decisions will be made by Republicans in the Georgia legislature and groups appointed by them.

The world you live in - your nation, your people - is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.

Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?” Mayer’s friend asked rhetorically.

And, without the benefit of a previous and recent and well-remembered fascistic regime to refer to, Mayer had to candidly answer: “Frankly, I do not know.”

This was the great problem that Mayer's Germans and so many in their day faced.

And now here we are, but this time we have the benefit of having seen this already play out in other nations, something the Germans of the 1930s lacked.

So how to counter it?

As Mayer so movingly narrates, the experience of 20th century Europe demonstrates that those abusing power must be confronted with equally vigorous power.

In the 1930s, Germans who believed in republican democracy were overwhelmed before they realized how completely their civil liberties and national institutions had been seized. Once the laws across the country were changed, it was too late to turn back.

We must not allow it to continue to happen in our nation. We must fight back against this naked assault on American democracy.

That starts by overruling at the federal level, with HR1 (the For The People Act), egregious laws like the one just passed in Georgia.

It continues by using HR1 to end partisan gerrymandering that causes states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania (among others) to send more Republicans to Congress than Democrats even though the majority the voters in those states actually voted for Democrats.

Both require us to end the anti-democratic filibuster immediately, or at least turn it back into the “Jimmy Stewart Filibuster” of yore so a vote eventually happens.

America is on the brink today, and if we don’t strengthen and restore democratic processes to our nation, Trump or someone much like him (Hawley, Cruz, Scott, Cotton) will use these new state-based laws to overrule the will of the voters in 2024 and end our American experiment.

The original post, along with links to details, is here: HartmannReport.com

March 25, 2021

Dear Republicans: What Did You Expect?

Dear Republican voter:

When Ted Nugent, the NRA and the GOP told you that more guns would make America a less violent society, what did you expect? Did you really think that suddenly every American would become a fast-draw marksman and vigilante justice would take us back to some happy Wild West movie fantasy?

When Trump said Covid was “just like the flu” at the same time he was telling Bob Woodward it was a killer, what did you expect? When he pushed refusing to wear a mask as if it were some sort of declaration of masculinity, and openly encouraged states and cities to remain open to produce “herd…er…thinking” did you really think that would keep a half-million Americans from dying?

When Trump sent thousands of modern-day brownshirts to storm the US Capitol and try to kill Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi so Trump could become the nation’s strongman dictator, what did you expect? Did you believe that American democracy was outdated, and our country would run better if a billionaire oligarch and his cronies just took everything over regardless of the will of the voters?

When five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court, in 2010 in Citizens United, ruled that billionaires and big corporations secretly bribing politicians was just “First Amendment-protected Free Speech,” what did you expect? Did you believe that was going to work out well for democracy in America? That it had, in any country, ever?

When Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist, along with Reagan, both Bush’s and Trump warned you about the dangers of “big government” and said it should be shrunk down small enough to be “drowned in the bathtub,” what did you expect? Did you really think that gutting environmental and banking protections; letting corporations dump more pollution into our air and water, poisoning our children; and restricting access to Medicaid, unemployment benefits and disability assistance was going to improve this country?

When Donald Trump (and Reagan & both Bush’s) told you that if America just showered trillions in tax cuts and and subsidies on our largest corporations and richest people that it would all “trickle down” to the rest of us, what did you expect? Did you really think those billionaires were going to happily pass their tax cuts along to you as a pay raise?

When Republican governors across the country told you that only private, for-profit electric companies could provide you with cheap, reliable electricity and that state or municipal utilities with no profit motive were a bad idea, what did you expect? Did you think Enron ripping people off & PG&E burning down part of California was an anomaly? That what just happened with the privatized Texas power grid when it was faced — again — with a winter storm was just a fluke?

When Ronald Reagan — and every Republican politician since him — told you that destroying labor unions would be a good thing and would help American workers, what did you expect? Did you really think that no longer having solidarity and representation against organized capital would lift up American workers and cause CEO’s to keep their own pay reasonable?

When George HW Bush told you the nation needed to double down on Nixon’s “War on Drugs” and put more people in prison, particularly Black people who were “selling crack cocaine in the park across the street from the White House” (a sale Bush set up), what did you expect? Did you really think that putting millions of Black people in prison for decades like Bush pitched with his “Willie Horton” ad campaign was somehow going to make America a better place to live?

When Donald Trump tried to cut off food stamps to over a million people in the middle of a pandemic, what did you expect? Did you really think it was going to “force“ people to get a job in the face of a disease that could kill them? Went over 10 million jobs had just vanished from the economy?

When former oil industry CEOs George W. Bush and Dick Cheney told you that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, coincidentally sitting on the world’s second-largest oil reserve, was plotting to attack America, even as the United Nations and our own American weapons inspectors were saying it was a lie, what did you expect? Did you really think America could conquer a country, sell off its natural resources, and its people would just happily go along with it? How’d that work out in Vietnam?

When Wall Street Billionaire Pete Peterson and his friends in the GOP put up their “debt clock” and told you that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme that was going to go bankrupt and therefore should be handed over to the big Wall Street banks, what did you expect? Did you think the bankers and the Republicans they own were actually going to help build a stronger social safety net for average Americans?

When Reagan’s Interior Secretary, James Watt, told you that it was just fine to sell off federal lands for pennies on the dollar to giant mining and drilling companies because Jesus was soon going to return and “make all things new,” what did you expect? For that matter, when Trump’s Interior Secretary, a coal industry lobbyist, said the same thing without the religion, did you really expect it would help our public lands? Did you think it had nothing to do with massive campaign contributions to the GOP?

When Republicans changed course in 1980 and threw in with antiabortion activists, but promised only “reasonable” restrictions, what did you expect? How about Arkansas that just passed a law last month to put a child who’s impregnated by a rapist in prison if she tries to get an abortion? Or Texas, where legislators are trying to get the death penalty for young victims of incest who get an abortion?

When Donald Trump encouraged violence at his rallies, promoted racist slogans and policies, promised to pay the legal bills of people who became violent, and openly celebrated police “roughing up” the people they’re supposed to protect and serve, what did you expect? Did you think it would restrain the authoritarianism and racism of his followers and police? Really?

When Trump and Fox News tried to characterize as “thugs” the millions of people in our streets protesting the murder of George Floyd and so many other unarmed Black men, what did you expect? Did you think the cops would stop racist and violent policing without any sort of public pressure or accountability? When has that ever happened?

When oil company shills were all over the media telling us that global warming is a hoax and that carbon dioxide was good for trees and so we should have more of it, and Republican politicians for 40 years echoed them (and continue to), what did you expect? Did you really believe that burning all those fossil fuels and throwing all those poisons in the air would have no consequence?

When, during the last three presidential primaries, Republican candidates like Ron Paul argued that the best way to provide healthcare for Americans was to eliminate all government programs so that people would be forced to “stand on their own two feet“ and figure out their own healthcare solutions, what did you expect? Did you really buy Congressman Paul’s argument that in his day doctors like him were paid with chickens and we should think of that as an inspiration for our healthcare system today?

When you voted for Republicans while Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was actively gutting our public schools, promoting for-profit corporate schools, and making a joke out of any kind of solution to our student debt crisis, what did you expect? Did you actually believe that she and the GOP had any interest in building up our public schools and helping our teachers?

When your Republican state representatives told you they were passing legislation to “ensure election integrity,” what did you expect? Did you really believe they were going to make sure everybody in America who is legally eligible to vote could have their vote counted? Did you assume they’d never end up blocking you from the voting rolls?

Seriously, did you expect Republicans were somehow going to do away with the 10-hour lines in neighborhoods where lots of registered Democrats live but everything would be fine for you? Did you believe them when they said voting by mail was a dangerous and insecure system, after states like Oregon and most of Western Europe have been doing it for more than 20 years without any problems whatsoever?

The simple fact is that Republicans have been lying to voters like you for better than 40 years, from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and “War on Drugs,” through Reagan’s “Supply Side Economics,” right up to today’s Trump/GOP line that the 2020 election was filled with “voter fraud.”

They’re all lies, to disguise the fact that the GOP worships money and power alone, and puts those two things above the safety and security of average Americans every time.

For the past 18 years on my radio show I’ve been running a contest. To win, all you need to do is name a single piece of post-1980 legislation that was first written by a Republican, majority-sponsored by Republicans in Congress, passed by a majority of Republicans and signed by a Republican president — and has as its main beneficiaries average working people, instead of rich people or big corporations.

Nobody has ever won the prize, which is your choice of any of my books, with a personalized inscription.

Our country needs us all to be awake to what Republicans are up to in our federal and state capitols as they try to savage democracy and turn our country over to the oligarchs who pay their bills.

The 2020 election seems to show that Republican voters are figuring out the scam that GOP politicians have been running on them for two generations, which is why the Party is scrambling to make it harder to vote.

If you’re a good-faith former Republican voter who was taken in by these lies but has now seen the light, the Democratic Party is more than happy to welcome you back to sanity. A new day is coming.

This was originally posted at: www.HartmannReport.com

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