https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/republican-plot-against-america

The #Republican Party and Their #Billionaire Backers’ Plot Against #America
#THOMHARTMANN

..."Predictably, now that Republicans and the morbidly rich billionaires who own them have broken most of the social contract and systems that held the middle class together (and our middle class has gone from being almost two-thirds of us to fewer than half of us), people are looking for a change.

Politicians have been promising that change—a break with Reagan’s neoliberalism—since the 1990s.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned on change but missed or ignored most of their chances to stop the disintegration of the middle class, and Bush, Bush Jr., and Trump all doubled down on Reaganomics.

Finally now, many Americans—particularly “low information voters”—have reached a breaking point.

Their kids carry hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt.
Forty-one percent of American families have more medical debt than they can handle.
As Republican governors roll out voucher programs, our schools are failing and simultaneously under attack from fanatic bigots.
Fox “News” and other hate-driven media have convinced them that the U.S. is being “invaded” by brown-skinned people.
They’re in a constant state of hysteria about CRT, DEI, BLM, Antifa, drag queens, Taylor Swift, and any other boogeymen they can come up with.
These are the people Republicans are counting on to support transforming America from a democratic republic into a strongman authoritarian oligarchy. The GOP’s bet is that if they can keep things broken and bad enough long enough, then people will demand a dictator “who can get things done.”

They even hatched a scheme called Project 2025 that hyper-concentrates political power in the White House, pre-positioning the next Republican president to be America’s first dictator.

The good news is that President Biden is actually doing something about each of these areas where Republicans have worked so hard for the past 43 years to break our country. And his work is producing good fruit: Inflation is down, employment is up, wages are up, and consumer confidence is growing."...

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/who-controls-the-us-political-system

The #Billionaires Got #Organized. The People Didn't. The Rest Is #History
#THOMHARTMANN
Jan 04, 2024

..."Regulating #polluting #industries and fossil fuel emissions was all the rage in the 1970s, and people loved it. But the billionaires hated it. As the #EPA historian noted, by the time Russell Train had become the EPA Administrator in 1973, they were starting to get organized and active:
...
That was also the year that America’s industrialists got serious about taking tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell’s Memo’s advice: the rich needed to step up and start buying off politicians and judges, seize control of the media, and use their endowments to stock universities with rightwing professors while pushing out the old-line liberals.

They got a big boost in 1976 (Buckley) and 1978 (Bellotti) when five Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that billionaires and corporations buying off politicians was no longer considered criminal bribery: from those years forward it was, instead, “Constitutionally protected First Amendment free speech” and corporations were no longer legal fictions but fully “persons” who could claim protections under the Bill of (Human) Rights.
...
The think tanks got to work, backstopping the GOP at every opportunity. Money flowed to Republican politicians, both state and federal. A small army of commentators was organized, some of them scientists and economists willing to go on-the-take, to convince Americans that regulations weren’t something that would protect average people but were, instead, instruments of socialism or communism.

Their factotum, Jude Wanniski, even came up with a bizarre new economic theory that included techno-sounding phrases like “trickle down” and “supply side” to justify massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich.

The agencies like the EPA that were doing the regulating would, henceforth, be known as the “deep state,” a designation so creepy that few would choose to defend them.
...
The indoctrination of the Republican voter is so complete that when then-President Trump gutted over 100 environmental regulations — making it more toxic and dangerous to live or work in America and putting our children at risk of childhood cancers and birth defects — there wasn’t a peep. Most Republican voters don’t even know it happened,
...
This fifty-year-long plot executed by some of the richest men (with few exceptions, they’re almost all men) in America to gut income taxes and environmental regulations has been a stunning success. Without the burden of income taxes, they’re now richer than any humans ever before in the history of the Earth. Richer than the pharaohs, richer than the Caesars, richer than any king in European, African, or Asian history.

Do they care that they’re leaving the rest of us a dying planet? That their actions have created a toxic brew of paranoia and distrust — along with an obese orange-faced monster — that is on the verge of ending the American experiment? That Americans are dying every day from the pollution and climate change their products produce?"...

Republicans pretend to be tough because, inside, they all want their daddy to take care of them. This dependence in Daddy is also part of the reason they're so in love with authoritarianism and so susceptible to fake news.

The deadly reason Republicans are suckers for fake news

By Thom Hartmann

[The article below is copied in its entirety because of a possible paywall. Unlike my copy, the original article, if you can access it, contains links. Because of the volume of text, I did not italicize it. My comments, like this one, appear inside square brackets.]

Multiple recent studies show that Republicans are as much as 8.5 times more likely to both believe and share fake or false “news” with others than are Democrats. The phenomenon is obvious, actually: while as many as half of Republicans believe the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, there’s no similarly disprovable “big lie” embraced by Democrats.
And it’s not limited to things like elections that are overtly political: Republicans were more likely than Democrats to reject basic science about Covid, and thus die of the disease at much higher rates than Democrats.

Even when their lives and their families’ lives are at stake, Republicans let themselves be suckered into believing things that are easily proven false. It’s gotten so bad that Republicans are more than 400% more likely to be banned from Twitter than Democrats.

Why is this? It turns out there are several reasons.

First, conservatives are more vulnerable to listening to and believing people who present themselves as authority figures. This tracks back to George Lakoff’s finding that conservatives are most comfortable in a world that’s run along “strict father” lines, while progressives prefer a “nurturing family” model of society and politics. [emphasis mine]

[It's ironic in this context that Republicans are always screaming about their mistrust of authorities such as scientists, professors and other educators, etc., all of whom are actual authorities, in the sense of knowing what they're talking about. I think it's the same psychological disorder that causes them to accuse everyone else of the things of which they are guilty. What do clinical psychologists call this phenomenon? "Reaction formation"?]

While a strict father limits freedom, he also provides a sense of safety: “Father will protect and take care of you.” Putting your trust in authoritarian figures diminishes the complexity of life: there’s less to have to know or worry about if you believe that “father” has it all under control. [emphasis mine]

[The reaction formation in this case is that Republicans are always screaming about "freedom" while going out of their way to curtail everyone else's freedoms, including the freedom to not be shot by a RWNJ.]

But it also makes conservatives more vulnerable to believing any old thing that “father” tells them.

Second, there’s more conservative misinformation out there than there is liberal misinformation. Thus, conservatives are more likely to be exposed to it and to share it.

To a large extent, this flows from the conservative worldview being more adolescent, narcissistic and “me-centered,” with the myth of the “rugged individual” at its center. Ayn Rand’s writing epitomizes this.

The conservative worldview putting, as it does, the “freedom of the individual” above the “welfare of society,” is much more vulnerable to corporate-funded pitches that work to increase profits. The core message of most advertising is, after all, “You are the most important person in the world and you want this product.”

[Except that the Republican worldview doesn't actually care about the “freedom of the individual”. It cares about the freedom of Republicans to take away everyone else's freedoms, up to and including slavery, murder, rape, etc.]

And make no mistake about it: a lot of what passes as news and commentary is actually advertising for the idea that corporations and billionaires should be able to do whatever they want.

“Low taxes, reduced regulations, smaller government”: it’s a sales pitch.

Our tax law is organized in such a way that anything that increases profits is tax-deductible to a corporation, so, for example, we’ve seen in the past few decades:

The tobacco industry organizing “smokers rights” groups in the 1970s and 1980s to keep people addicted and buying their products.

The fossil fuel industry organizing “climate change denial” think tanks, websites, and PR efforts to resist any efforts to “green” our power sources in ways that would decrease their profitability.

The weapons industry funneling millions into front groups like the NRA to buy politicians who will make it easier to sell their products, regardless of how many people die in accidental and mass shootings.

Rightwing media organizations promoting blatant lies from “Father Trump” about Covid and the 2020 election because Trump’s base of followers — their audience — is large enough to drive significant advertising revenues.

Just these four points have become foundational to the GOP: Republican politicians are fond of being pictured with cigars and guns while denying climate change and deifying rightwing media.

[The following two paragraphs are like a guidebook on How to be an Authoritarian:]

While Republicans have always been vulnerable to this sort of psychological manipulation, we had guardrails in place to protect the public from being swamped by it. [emphasis mine]

When Reagan took down the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, Congress passed bipartisan legislation putting it back into effect: Reagan vetoed it. [emphasis mine]

[And so Fox "News" and its ilk were born, cementing the authoritarians' ability to manipulate Joe Republican by appeal to his Daddy worship.]

Various versions of the Telecommunications Act dating back to the 1920s limited the ability of corporations or the morbidly rich to own large numbers of radio and TV stations or have cross-ownership with newspapers. Those limits were all ended in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996: within a few years a handful of rightwing networks owned thousands of stations.

But even if those two guardrails for democracy were reinstituted, they do nothing for or about the internet or social media, which now competes with legacy media for the minds and hearts of Americans.

Almost half of Americans get much or most of their news from social media, and social media doesn’t have editors or systems to make sure that what people think his news is actually news.

Giant corporations and the morbidly rich people they create — along with foreign governments — can thus use their extraordinary resources to flood the internet with favorable websites pretending to be news and information sources, all while overwhelming social media conversations with their paid trolls and smart bots.

As I laid out in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America, Section 230 of Clinton’s Telecommunications Act eliminates most possibilities of holding social media or websites responsible for bad behavior ranging from lies to threats to online plots to overthrow the government.

This “get out of jail free” card has made more than a few social media billionaires, and with that money they’ll continue to carefully restrain Congress from any meaningful regulation, just as the media empires that grew out of the end of the Fairness Doctrine and radio/TV ownership limits will use their platforms to prevent any effort to reinstate those laws.

Which presents the majority of Americans who subscribe to the “nurturing family” model of life and politics with a problem: how do we protect our friends and families (and, thus, our democratic republic) from falling prey to corporate, billionaire, and foreign hustlers who are spending billions to control our understanding of reality?

Finland has started teaching critical thinking skills and media literacy in its school system to combat, in part, the lies and misinformation that spill into their homes daily from Russian television stations on their border.

Given how Republicans are all-in on banning books and censoring teachers, though, it’s unlikely anything like that will happen any day soon here in the US.

For the time being, we’ll have to double down on pushing real information to deluded friends and family, using the “parental controls” on elderly parents’ TV to block Fox, and sharing progressive media and websites far and wide.

And doing everything we can to elect politicians who will tell the truth and hold democracy as a higher value than simple political power.

Because if the fake news wins and neofascist politicians like Trump again gain serious national power, America will be on a fast track down the same road as Russia.

#Republicans #FakeNews #Gullibility #DaddyIssues #ThomHartmann

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/republicans-and-fake-news/

Trump is a terrorist. If his plans succeed, he will become a terrorist who is also a dictator

Is Trump following the same well-worn path blazed by other terrorist leaders?

By Thom Hartmann

[In case this article is paywalled, the text is copied below in its entirety. But because of its length, I have not italicized it. My comments are contained within square brackets, as this one is. Anything else is quoted directly from the article. In places, noted by comments in brackets, I have emphasized some text for the benefit of speed-readers and perusers.]

Yesterday morning at 6:15 am Provo time, Craig Robertson was shot and killed by the FBI after posting to Facebook that he was going to assassinate President Biden during his trip this week to Utah.
Had the FBI not stopped him, he may well have pulled it off: he had a high-tech sniper rifle and apparently knew how to use it. The shoot-out he started with FBI agents trying to arrest him, if nothing else, was a tell.

This, I believe, is exactly what Donald Trump wants. [emphasis mine]

In response to Trump’s rants, according to Vice News, Robertson had posted to Facebook multiple screeds about the “stolen” 2020 election. Believing Trump’s lie that President Biden was an illegitimate pretender to the White House, he posted:

“IN MY DREAM I SEE JOE BIDEN'S BODY IN A DARK CORNER OF A DC PARKING GARAGE WITH HIS HEAD SEVERED AND LYING IN A HUGE PUDDLE OF BLOOD. HOORAH!!!”

When news came that President Biden was coming to Utah this week, Robertson posted:

“PERHAPS UTAH WILL BECOME FAMOUS THIS WEEK AS THE PLACE A SNIPER TOOK OUT BIDEN THE MARXIST.”

Just a few days earlier, Trump had publicly condemned “the Marxists” who he said were persecuting him.

In openly encouraging rage and violence, Trump is following a well-worn path blazed by many terrorist leaders before him. [emphasis mine]

Osama bin Laden, for example, never killed anybody. Several narratives suggest he didn’t even know the details of 9/11 until the twin towers had fallen.

Bin Laden also apparently didn’t fund the attack on 9/11 (according to the 9/11 Commission), just as Trump didn’t fund Robertson or the thousands of terrorists who attempted to murder Vice President Pence and Speaker Pelosi on January 6th.

As ABC News reporter John Miller, who interviewed bin Laden and covered 9/11 extensively, wrote:

“He didn't pay for the World Trade Center bombing or the plot to kill Clinton, but [he thought] they were good ideas.”

Bin Laden inspired the attack with his rhetoric, just as Trump has inspired numerous terrorist assaults here in America with his rhetoric. [emphasis mine]

ABC News did a deep dive into presidential-inspired terrorism in America. While George W. Bush and Barack Obama said a lot of things in their combined 16 years in office, some fairly controversial, the network reports:

“ABC News could not find a single criminal case filed in federal or state court where an act of violence or threat was made in the name of President Barack Obama or President George W. Bush.” [emphasis mine] [Donald Trump is our first terrorist president, at least in recent history, and probably ever.]

That was very much not the case with Trump, however:

“But a nationwide review conducted by ABC News has identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence, or allegations of assault.” [emphasis mine]

From August 15, 2015 to April 30, 2020 (the article was published in May, 2020, long before the January 6th terror attack on the Capitol), ABC News identified over fifty separate cases where acts or attempted acts of terror were carried out against people Trump had targeted.

They ranged from beatings to murders to attempted mass killings: [emphasis mine]

“The 54 cases identified by ABC News are remarkable in that a link to the president is captured in court documents and police statements, under the penalty of perjury or contempt.
“These links are not speculative – they are documented in official records. And in the majority of cases identified by ABC News, it was perpetrators themselves who invoked the president in connection with their case, not anyone else.” [emphasis mine]

In the three-plus years since, there have, no doubt, been hundreds more. And now Trump is turning up the volume, stoking the often-violent fury of the people unfortunate enough to believe his lies.

Consider the top headline at Raw Story yesterday:

“‘Just the beginning’: Ex-FBI official warns more assassins could be inspired by Trump”

No former president in American history has encouraged such violence or tried to inspire stochastic terrorism. [emphasis mine]

It has simply never happened here before.

Outside of the Confederacy, no American politician has worked so hard to tear America apart, to pit citizens against each other, to destroy our republic from within. Neither has any former president made alliance with and taken hundreds of millions of dollars from hostile foreign agents like Putin’s oligarchs and Saudi Arabia’s MBS.

No president has ever invited a mob to attack the US Capitol and terrorize lawmakers to change the outcome of an election. This terrorist act led to the death of nine people, including four police officers, and Donald Trump has not only not apologized, but he has praised the terrorists he summoned and promised to pardon them.

He plays a song he sings with them at every one of his rallies. He speaks along with the prisoners, people accused of violence that could extend as far as murder. In solidarity with “their cause.”

He has never once condemned any of the murders, attempted murders and bombings, or other acts of violence that have been committed in his name over the past seven years. Instead, we hear that there are “very fine people on both sides.”

Frank Figliuzzi, former Assistant Director for Counterintelligence at the FBI, whose work involved terrorism and understands it well, told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner last night:

“If you think you've seen this before, it's because you have. It is a common theme, this concept that somebody is controlling the globe, controlling elections, and politics. And it's all bad. They're vile, they're subhuman. And it's also something called stochastic terrorism, which is the concept that some leader figures are putting out people as less than human, dehumanizing them, they're evil, and therefore it becomes easier for people to respond to that ideology and act out violently.

He talked about how this would actually be the second wave of Trump terrorism in America, were it to happen again. [emphasis mine]

“We certainly saw it in large numbers of people, a thousand arrested already, on January 6th, we saw people willing to die, including Ashli Babbitt, who consumed these Trump conspiracy theories, wrapped up in a Trump campaign flag as she's breaching security at the Capitol. We saw it in Cincinnati where a man breached security, or tried to, at the FBI's Cincinnati field office. Ended up dying in a cornfield after hours of standoff.”

Figliuzzi seemed struck by the solemnity of a former president encouraging acts of terrorism, and where it may go:

“I’m afraid this is not in any way the end of this, but rather just the beginning, as we continue to see Trump and his cohorts making vile accusations against people that are now prosecuting Trump, whether they are prosecutors or judges. So there is more of this coming. And law enforcement's challenge, of course, is to get out in front of this before the really bad thing happens."

Trump posting a picture of himself threatening New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg with a baseball bat isn’t cute or funny: it’s a call for brutality or an assassination. It’s an incitement to terrorism.

Now, facing the possibility of time in prison for his crimes, Trump is encouraging the wannabe and weekend terrorists among his base to murder witnesses, prosecutors, and the judges overseeing his case. And to influence jurors so at least one person may lie when questioned by the judge and claim that he is not a fervent Trump follower but then vote to hang the jury. [emphasis mine]

That would teach them to challenge him. They should have known better, like all those women, he would tell you. The criminal justice system shouldn’t have tried to come after him, he proclaims. Soon there will be carnage.

Outside of the occasional mob boss prosecution, only cases of terrorism have provoked state or federal officials to engage in the extensive security precautions now needed because of Trump’s incitements.

How can our newspapers and other media not see this? Anybody who has been in or near a country in a civil war understands the role Trump is playing. [emphasis mine]

[Good question: How do they not see this? I reckon they do see it but view it in their best economic interests to spin it.]

Trump has openly said he wants to release information which the government says could be used to target people who have investigated him, testified against him, and might serve on the jury that could condemn him. [emphasis mine]

[This person cannot be allowed to hold any position of power -- including the power that comes with wealth. He needs to be stripped of all of it.]

He is demanding the right to release it all, in defiance of every legal norm known, to devastate the case against him by polluting the jury pool through winning the case in the media before it even gets to court. If he can do that, the court action will seem petty.

Perception is everything, and he knows it. Every dictator in history knows it: that’s how they became dictators.

This is a man with no scruples and no limits. Anything you can imagine, he can probably exceed. Consider the headline at Mediaite yesterday:

“‘My Blood Ran Cold’: Ex-Trump Official Horrified By ‘Criminal Plot’ to Have Military ‘Turn Their Guns on Civilians to Facilitate a Losing Candidate’” [emphasis mine]

He has repeatedly lied to his followers that his First Amendment free speech rights are being abused, as a setup to cause Americans to lose confidence in our form of government.

In fact, the protective order that will be the focus of this Friday’s meeting in Judge Chutkan’s courtroom is designed to make sure the jury sees the evidence against Trump before he can publicize it to pollute the jury pool and intimidate witnesses who may testify against him.

Such protective orders are routine, but Trump wants to be tried in the court of public opinion, which he knows how to manipulate, rather than in a court of law, where he knows he will probably lose. He believes if he can get in the White House he can pardon himself, a classic dictator’s move. Terrorists like this kind of thing, too. [emphasis mine]

The mainstream American media has always been a few steps behind Trump in his march toward an attempted fascist takeover of America.

It took them years to use the simple word “lies” to describe his lies. They were reluctant to use the word “terrorism” in connection with January 6th (although The New York Times published an op-ed concluding that it was, in fact, a terrorist attack).

Now, even in the face of naked attacks on the rule of law, our court system, the FBI, and President Biden and VP Harris — they are reluctant to bluntly identify what are clearly incitements of a terrorist reaction to Trump’s prosecutions like we saw yesterday in Idaho.

Had similar characterizations of our police, courts, and intelligence agencies come from the president of Iran, for example, every media outlet in America would be identifying it as an explicit call to either tear the country apart or justify and activate terrorist violence.

Rachel Maddow recently noted that history won’t be asking how it was possible that a former president of the United States could be prosecuted for his crimes; instead, history will ask how such a criminal could have ever become president in the first place.

The answer, as we all know, was laid out by Robert Mueller’s investigation (the unredacted version of which Merrick Garland is still keeping confidential, even though it was written specifically to be released publicly).

Vladimir Putin made sure Paul Manafort was installed as Trump’s campaign manager after Viktor Yanukovych, the Putin puppet Manafort had installed in Ukraine, was thrown out.

Manafort, who didn’t even ask for a paycheck for running Trump’s campaign but did all the work for free, then fed confidential internal polling data to Russian intelligence showing where “persuasion” could help Trump or hurt Clinton.

That persuasion came to America by way of 29 million social media posts, viewed or liked 126 million times, from Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency — the Kremlin — specifically targeting American voters Manafort had identified in a half-dozen or so states.

In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 44,292 votes. In Wisconsin it was 22,748 votes, and in Michigan a mere 10,704 votes. Had Prigozhin not been successful in targeting those 77,744 voters for Putin and Trump, Hillary Clinton would — by any reasonable estimate — have become president in 2016. [emphasis mine]

Putin’s terror campaign is now targeting Ukraine, the country Trump withheld weapons from and tried to blackmail into helping him steal the 2020 election.

Putin’s man Trump’s terror campaign is now targeting us, at least those of us who are not straight white Trump supporters, as he has done virtually every day since he came down the escalator in Trump Tower and began his hateful rant about “Mexican rapists and murderers.”

How long will our court and criminal justice system tolerate this ongoing assault, this open campaign to promote stochastic terror?

How long will our media recoil from calling him a terrorist as more and more Americans are terrorized, beaten, and murdered by people invoking his name the way Mohamed Atta invoked bin Laden’s?

How long will the GOP continue to tolerate a man who encourages terrorism — even against members of his own party — among their ranks?

It’s possible that we “ain’t seen nothing yet” and Trump will activate far more widespread terror activity and violence before he goes down.

It could be a disaster like none of us have ever lived through, but that I have personally seen in several countries that descended into war.

I helped develop a refugee center in Uganda in the middle of the war with Idi Amin. And I was in South Sudan, on the border with Darfur, as the villages were being burned by the Janjaweed just 15 miles from me. And a few other uncomfortable places in the years I did international relief work.

When people turn against each other in the same country, from what I’ve seen, it is the most brutal kind of warfare.

It’s also possible that this fever will soon break, and America will begin to return to some semblance of normalcy as a whole new set of crises provoked by climate change beset our land and redirect our attention.

Or that Trump may simply self-destruct.

As they say in the news business, stay tuned.

#Trump #Terrorism #ThomHartmann

https://www.rawstory.com/thom-hartmann/

Concealing the Truth: Why Are Republicans Blocking the Study of Disinformation and Propaganda?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrlVy9LBKCA
6:31 min video
#video by #ThomHartmann

A really nice analysis. Among the gems buried in this article are reminders of how much better a president Carter was than Reagan and the devastating effects of the Republicans' war on education.

Republicans have been lying to their voters — and now those same voters are dying

From #ThomHartmann (whom I find consistently well-informed and insightful)

#Climate #ClimateChange #Republicans #Lies #Oligarchy #WagesOfIgnorance #ComingHomeToRoost

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/killer-tornado/

A bit melodramatic towards the end, but nevertheless: The crisis of neoliberalism: America arrives at one of history’s great crossroads

#Salon #ThomHartmann #Neoliberalism #Economics