May 11, 2021

The Democrats' "Killer App" Against Voter Suppression Unveiled

With all their new “voter suppression” laws in the states, Republicans are working to keep and improve a corrupt system that’s put them in power and keeps them in power, despite only representing a minority of Americans nationwide.

That’s why they’re trying to change our election law with little tweaks like making it harder to get a mail-in ballot or preventing people from bringing a drink of water to somebody in line.

This is not about making genuinely new law. The bigger picture, for them, is hanging onto to the power they and their billionaire supporters have already grabbed.

In fact, they’re trying to solidify, cement, deepen and broaden an already corrupted system that got them power in the first place and has kept them in power for the better part of at least two decades since the Supreme Court Bush v Gore decision in 2001 and the later Shelby County decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Billionaires were brought into the act with Citizens United in 2010.

In several states, like Michigan and Wisconsin (among others), the majority of voters in the state vote for Democrats — resulting in Democrats as governors and in other statewide offices — but Republicans, because of the corrupt system that includes things like gerrymanders, still control the state House and Senate as well as sending a majority of Republicans to Congress in DC.

They’re trying to maintain this larger status quo while tweaking and tightening it with these new laws.

Which is why when state officials and even Trump-appointed judges concluded, in Red state after Red state, that the 2020 election was clean, fair and accurate, the GOP decided to do something about the new crisis they now confront.

That crisis is that they repeatedly lost even more elections in 2020.

Georgia lost two Senate seats, numerous formerly Republican states went for Joe Biden instead of the previous guy, and Democrats got elected to state legislatures and as governors.

Republicans lost the House, the Senate, and the White House. Emergency! It’s not supposed to work this way!

The Republican solution to this, of course, is to make it harder to vote, harder to register to vote, and harder to mail-in vote. But while those are the things that get the headlines, the really insidious stuff is rarely mentioned.

It comes in two parts.

The first is that they’re replacing professional, long-term, non-partisan polling officials and election referees with Republican partisan hacks, so they can decide which votes the state is going to count and which votes they’re going to throw out.

The second is that they’re inviting goons into the polling places to harass, intimidate and threaten people whose only crime is that they want to participate in their own democracy. They call these goons “poll watchers,” and in the past such people have shown up with baseball bats, Confederate flags, and even video recording equipment.

This poll-watching thing used to be a big deal across the country before it was first outlawed in 1965: former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist actually got his start in Republican politics in the early 1960s doing this with something called Operation Eagle Eye in Arizona. Mostly it was stopped by the Voting Rights Act, but the US Supreme Court has since gutted that so now the GOP wants to get back to it.

Thus, Republicans are now reviving a pair of strategies that Democrats used to use in the Old South, before 1964/1965 when Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which flipped the white-racist vote from Democratic to Republican in a single decade.

Republicans are now trying to stop people from voting — or having their votes counted — pretty much any way they can.

And they’re picking up steam! As of a bit over a month ago, the Brennen Center for Justice noted:

As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states. That’s 108 more than the 253 restrictive bills tallied as of February 19, 2021 — a 43 percent increase in little more than a month.

These measures have begun to be enacted. Five restrictive bills have already been signed into law. In addition, at least 55 restrictive bills in 24 states are moving through legislatures: 29 have passed at least one chamber, while another 26 have had some sort of committee action (e.g., a hearing, an amendment, or a committee vote).

Democrats, however, have a “killer app” that will stop these Republican voter suppression and election-rigging efforts dead in their tracks.

It’s the first piece of legislation passed out of the House of Representatives and the first put on the floor of the United States Senate, HR1 and SB1, with the official name of the For The People Act.

Outside of reducing the ability of states to mail out absentee ballots, every one of the dozen-plus strategies Republicans are building into their laws to rig the vote would be blocked or outlawed by this legislation.

It’s the giant killer. (There’s a good explainer here.)

As Vox noted:

More than 80 percent of respondents said they supported preventing foreign interference in elections, limiting the influence of money in politics, and modernizing election infrastructure to increase election security. More than 60 percent of respondents supported requiring nonpartisan redistricting commissions, a 15-day early voting period for all federal elections, same-day registration for all eligible voters, automatic voter registration for all eligible voters, and giving every voter the option to vote by mail.

It will guarantee that every citizen in this country, regardless of their race or economic status, will have an equal right to vote in all elections that have any federal component whatsoever. (Most Americans don’t realize that there is no affirmative right to vote in the Constitution, so we need laws like this to protect that right.)

It also means that the small number of billionaires who spend the largest amount of money on our elections will have to identify themselves, something they strongly object to.

As People for the American Way President Ben Jealous noted, in the 2016 election alone, “just 400 political donors gave a combined $1.5 billion — more than five million small donors combined.” This law will will require transparency on their part and give campaigns that rely on smaller donors a boost.

And the majority of the people want it! Multiple studies and polls have shown that when the provisions of the law are explained to voters, an overwhelming majority of Democrats and a solid majority of Republicans are heartily in favor of it.

The For The People Act is also co-sponsored by 49 out of the 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats; the lone holdout is a West Virginia multimillionaire who shows up on Fox News a lot.

It’s a 100% certainty that Republicans will filibuster this legislation, which means 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats need to get together and either end the filibuster or, as I’ve frequently suggested, convert it into a “Jimmy Stewart Filibuster,“ where senators can talk as long as they want and as long as they have 40 colleagues with them on the Senate floor, but when they’re done or their number of colleagues drops below 40, a vote will happen.

It’s unlikely that you or I will have much influence on Joe Manchin (unless you live in West Virginia or are a major campaign donor of his), but we can make our opinions known to President Biden and Senator Schumer, who have a variety of options, both carrots and sticks, when it comes to dealing with recalcitrant or attention-seeking senators. We can also let our own senators know our opinion so they can speak with Manchin.

The way to send a message to President Biden is through the portal at www.whitehouse.gov/contact, and you can call Senator Schumer’s office — and your senators’ offices — via the Capitol building’s switchboard at 202-224-3121.

Tag - you’re it!

Original post with links to sources at: HartmannReport.com

May 10, 2021

The Deep Delusions of The GOP Stripped Down

Jamie Dimon is whining about Biden’s upcoming tax increases on rich people like himself: screw him. But more about that in a minute.

Ever since the late 1970s and early 1980s, both the Republican and Democratic parties have been operating, in part, on delusion and fantasy.

It really goes back to the 1940s and 1950s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was putting America back together after the Republican Great Depression and rich people were looking for a way to reduce that 90% top tax rate and get rid of those pesky unions that FDR had legalized.

A few conservative economic “thinkers” like Milton Friedman began promoting the notion that the classical economics the world had operated on for 7000 years, referred to in that era as demand-side economics, Adam Smith economics or Keynesianism, were now out of date. Democracy was also out of date, according to these people.

Prior to this time, everyone pretty much understood that economies were sort of like football games. There were players, rules and referees.

The players ranged from the very rich to the very poor, from factory owners to workers; the rules defined how much the rich could exploit the poor and how society could protect itself from their depredations; and the referees were the government agencies that oversaw those regulations.

The main thing that informs and defines the rules, which Adam Smith wrote two books about during the Revolutionary era — particularly his Theory of Moral Sentiments — is the question, “What is best for society as a whole?”

Is the economy here to serve us, or are we here to serve the economy?

It was the essential question of democracy. The idea laid out in the Declaration of Independence that “governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

As various societies have learned over the years, including ours during that time after the Republican Great Depression, having rules that protected the least powerful and most vulnerable of the “players” in the economic game actually worked to the benefit of everybody.

When workers could have unions, financial institutions were carefully regulated, and there were limits to how much wealth and power could be accumulated by an individual company or family (mostly through tax policy), it built, grew and helped society as a whole.

But Friedman and his ilk promoted the idea that in the “modern age” of the 1960s and 1970s, sending men to the moon and flying across oceans in a matter of hours, the slow and methodical process of regulating an economy through government action was out of date.

There was just no way, he said, that any government bureaucracy could have a close enough finger on the pulse of the marketplace to really know what should be regulated, when, or how.

Many of his followers, who spun off into the Libertarian and Objectivist movements before taking over the GOP, even went so far as to say that democracy was merely “mob rule” and should be replaced by an aristocracy of the very wealthy, who clearly knew what they were doing and how things worked or they wouldn’t be as rich as they were.

Friedman argued that instead of democracy — government, bureaucrats, and politicians making decisions about an economy — the largest “players” in the economy (the very, very rich) should be making those decisions because, every moment of every day, they were watching how the marketplace was moving, changing and reacting to new and different circumstances.

The “free market” would always, Friedman and his followers said, be superior to any government in terms of creating and producing the optimal outcome for all members of society. There were a million decisions a second being made in the “free market,” after all; wasn’t that a better base of data than monthly government statistics?

The key to it all, they said, was to get government out of the business of making rules for the economy or enforcing those rules. Instead, just leave that up to the ultra-rich and the barons of industry, who had all the data and knew what they were doing.

The main part of the process they were advocating was called “deregulation.” Ending oversight — regulation — of the economy by government.

Billionaire David Koch was so enamored of it that when he ran for vice president in 1980 he called for the end of virtually all federal regulatory agencies. Just leave it up to the billionaires: everything will get better.

These new economic and political ideologies circulated throughout the western world, and had their first serious tryout in 1973 when Augusto Pinochet took over Chile in a military coup and brought in Friedman and his “University of Chicago” acolytes to advise him.

Pinochet privatized the country’s Social Security program and murdered thousands who protested against him. His favorite method was throwing protesters out of helicopters, a deed memorialized on the Tee-shirts worn by numerous hard-right groups in the US during the George Floyd murder protests.

As Naomi Klein wrote of Pinochet’s time:

…Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to dismantle Chile's public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early 80s, Pinochet's Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialisation, a tenfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns.

That seemed to be working out for the elites, so in 1978 when Margaret Thatcher came to power as Prime Minister of Great Britain she tried to follow a similar path. She smashed the nation’s largest union, the coal miners, and deregulated and then sold off much of the nation’s rail infrastructure, among other things.

That was the year some Democrats started thinking maybe there was something to this stuff. In the last two years of his administration, 1979 and 1980, Jimmy Carter deregulated the trucking and travel industries, among others.

(I speak from first-hand experience: Louise and I jumped into this “new marketplace opportunity” with a travel business in Atlanta that we started from scratch in 1983, then sold in 1986 and took a year off in Germany to do international relief work.)

In 1981, when Reagan was sworn in as president, deregulation became the official policy of the US government as he slashed regulations across whole and huge industrial sectors and begin the process of aggressively dismantling America’s unions and other worker, environmental and consumer protections.

In 1993, figuring “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Bill Clinton and the New Democrats pursued similar policies, proudly declaring an end to “welfare as we know it” and “the era of big government.” (In the UK, Tony Blair destroyed the Labour Party by doing the same thing.)

Clinton brought in slightly more liberal versions of Friedman as his economic advisers and close friends — Jamie Dimon, Lawrence Summers and “the Davos crowd”; their consensus was to keep taxes and regulations low, to stop pushing for unions, and to embrace a new policy called “austerity.” It was simply a thinly-veiled system for stripping assets and protections from poor and working-class Americans and handing them off to the very rich, some of whom were then supporting Democrats as enthusiastically as Republicans.

But here we are in 2021.

The Republican embrace of these economic delusions remains unshaken. Working class Republicans will tell you that unions are a terrible thing and that the government needs to stay out of regulating business or protecting the environment. They recite right-wing talking points about how unemployment insurance produces sloth and laziness, but tax cuts for billionaires actually energize them to do more for all of us.

Democrats, however, largely appear to be waking up. Thankfully, there was a strain of clearheaded people within the Democratic Party throughout this entire period of time.

The Paul Wellstone, Bernie Sanders, Jan Shakowsky, Sherrod Brown wing of the Democratic Party that has always supported workers’ rights, been skeptical of “free trade” and “free markets,” and knew that without good, strong rules for the game of economics the richest people will always steamroller rest of us.

As noted earlier, Clinton’s old buddy Jamie Dimon is now out there squealing about how his taxes are going to go up after his bank took billions in bailouts (some of which ended up in his pocket), but, thankfully, Democrats generally are ignoring him and his ilk. Lawrence Summers is similarly crying in his beer. They’re dinosaurs and their time is past.

In the past two weeks Joe Biden has repeatedly proclaimed, “Trickle-down economics has never worked.” He’s openly rejecting Friedman’s ideas, Reagan’s policies, and the austerity economics that the leadership of the Democratic Party have danced with for the last 30 years.

This is a Very Good Thing.

As Democrats are waking up, the GOP is sinking deeper and deeper into delusion, now embracing the idea that the losers of elections (Trump) should be declared winners and Republican-controlled state legislatures should be deciding who won elections rather than voters (the new FL/TX/IA/AZ laws).

The leadership of the Republican Party clearly understands the con they’re running, and the Big Lie that Trump is promoting and to which they’re swearing fealty. But rank-and-file Republican voters, indoctrinated by billionaire oligarch Murdoch’s Fox so-called News and other right-wing sources, are keeping to their crazy, bot-flooded Facebook rooms and sinking deeper and deeper into delusion.

The Republican Party, still clinging to Friedman’s ideas and celebrating Pinochet and Thatcher, has gone from being a threat to the lives, health and wealth of working people to being a full-on threat to democracy and our republic itself.

Thankfully, the Democratic Party is returning to its progressive FDR roots. Time will tell if the GOP returns to the real world, but the Democratic Party is off to a good start at bringing this country back to rational economics and political sanity after 40 years of crazy that even they dabbled with.

Original post with links: HartmannReport.com

May 8, 2021

Americans Must Repudiate the Connection Between a Child-Murderer, Reaganism and Trumpism

The roots and brutality of the hard-right grew in the soil of libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s writings

Many Americans are baffled by the Republican Party’s embrace of billionaire sociopath Trump and elected Republicans’ willingness to overlook the death of seven Americans, including three police officers, in an attempted coup. (Particularly after they spent over 2 years and tens of millions of dollars obsessing on 4 dead Americans in Benghazi.)

They’re also wondering why Kevin McCarthy would reject Liz Cheney to embrace someone like Elise Stefanik, an apologist for the January 6 treason attempt, or go along with Mitch McConnell’s attempts to sabotage the American Rescue Plan, the American Jobs Plan, and the American Family Plan.

After all, people are hurting. We’re experiencing the worst pandemic in a century, and an economic downturn unmatched since the Republican Great Depression of the 1920s.

Why, Americans wonder, would the GOP embrace such anti-American and nakedly brutal politics and policies?

Why would they try so hard to destroy Medicare and Social Security? Why would they mourn the loss of Trump’s program to tear children from their families and throw them into cages? Why are they so enthusiastic about efforts to make it harder to vote?

Why do they continue to support Trump after he lost the House, Senate, and White House and continues to rant his anti-American, anti-democratic strongman rhetoric?

But it’s not just politics; the roots of this brutal movement in today’s GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, through a real-estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice and bringing a number of right-wing billionaires into the fold.

As a result, Republican policies over the past 40 years not only gutted America’s middle class, but led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led. Many Americans are now so confused about how government should work that they’ve embraced a bizarre conspiracy theory positing Trump as a sort of messiah and politicians like McConnell and Stefanick as noble statesmen and -women.

The Libertarians

Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.

This new Libertarian Party would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.

Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army and a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.

In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket. His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, close public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end food and housing support and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.

Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.

The child-killer who inspired a movement

Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous sociopath in 1927.

Back in 2015, Donald Trump told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”

“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

Ayn Rand’s novels have animated libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.

Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”

Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get what he wanted. Sort of like the plans of the person who planted bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters the night before January 6th.

Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”

On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote that he “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”

It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.

Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.

Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”

After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.

The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”

Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.

“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”

But Hickman wasn’t finished. “After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.

He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.

On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.

Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.

Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.

To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.

Ayn Rand falls in love with a “superman”

But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.

Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.

She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”

That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.

Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.

William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.

Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.

Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.

She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.

As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.

“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”

Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote, “It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”

Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him. Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”

The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.

“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”

Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, uncheck by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.

Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.

Libertarianism and Ayn Rand set the stage for Trumpism

Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.

And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department. Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven so far have died) would actually be a public good.

As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”

Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”

Sociopaths of the world, unite!

Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

Like Trump, McConnell, Stefanik and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.

In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.

Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes.

Suggesting that selfishness undermines most truly American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.

“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”

As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.” (4:20 in the clip)

“We’re taught to feel concern for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged, “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other — now why do you rebel?”

“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered. She added, “[Man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”

Rand’s philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did — in her lifetime — achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. But today Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of today’s Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the United States.

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly sociopathic president.

The result so far is over a half-million dead Americans, an economy laid waste, and the collapse of this nation’s working class.

While the ideas and policies promoted by the libertarian wing of the Republican Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich in recent decades, it’s killing the rest of us.

A return to sanity

In the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt put America back together after the First Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.

Today, 40 years of Ayn Rand’s ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any kings or Pharos in the history of the world, and brought a whole new generation of suckers, hustlers and grifters into the GOP.

When America was still coasting on FDR’s success in rebuilding our government and institutions, nobody took very seriously Rand’s or Koch’s misguided idealist efforts to tear it all down.

Now that libertarians and objectivists in the GOP have had 40 years to make their project work, we’re hitting peak libertarianism and it’s tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing people every day.

If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, and rebuild our civil institutions.

That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 40 years of Rand’s writings and libertarian “Reagan Republicans” have done to this country.

It will succeed if President Biden can overcome the cynicism and greed celebrated by McConnell, McCarthy and Stefanik, reclaim the mantle of FDR, and pull America out of the Second Republican Great Depression.

Original post with links and embedded video of Rand: HartmannReport.com

May 7, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

In other words, Barr lied through his teeth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Walsh didn’t take it lying down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One can only hope…

Original post with NY Times front page: HartmannReport.com

May 6, 2021

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

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

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

May 5, 2021

Why McConnell Is About to Destroy the GOP

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

Nobody’s asking, “Why?”

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

Why would McConnell do this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 4, 2021

Nomadland Exposes the Middle-Class Rip-Off

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re the lucky ones.

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

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

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

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

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

Why are these people living such marginalized lives?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original post: HartmannReport.com

May 3, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what the Republican party now represents: Oligarchy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dissent is no longer allowed in the GOP.

Authoritarianism has prevailed.

Oligarchy has completely seized the party.

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

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

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

Original post: HartmannReport.com

May 1, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America is today overwhelmed by factions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original post: HartmannReport.com

April 30, 2021

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

Count America In On "Trump Derangement Syndrome"

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original post: HartmannReport.com