January 17, 2024

Does the EPA Die Today?

Republicans on the Supreme Court are, it appears, planning to gut most of America’s regulatory agencies, in what could be the most consequential re-write of the protective “deep state” since it was largely created during the New Deal in the 1930s.

The vehicle for this radical transformation of America is a case that will be argued today, in just a few hours, before the Court: Loper Bright Enterprises v Gina Raimondo.

If they pull it off, these six corrupt Republicans on the Court could destroy the ability of:

— the EPA to regulate pollutants,
— the USDA to keep our food supply safe,
— the FDA to oversee drugs going onto the market,
— OSHA to protect workers,
— the CPSC to keep dangerous toys and consumer products off the market,
— the FTC to regulate monopolies,
— the DOT to come up with highway and automobile safety standards,
— the ATF to regulate guns,
— the Interior Department to regulate drilling and mining on federal lands,
— the Forest Service to protect our woodlands and rivers,
— the FCC to protect us from internet predators,
— and the Department of Labor to protect workers’ rights.

Among other things on the rightwing billionaire wish-list: virtually the entirety of America’s ability to protect its citizens from corporate predation rests on what’s called the Chevron deference (more on that in a moment), which the Court appears prepared to overturn.

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says he wants to eliminate the Department of Education “on day one” if he’s elected president. If the Supreme Court has its way, he wouldn’t have to bother. It’ll become impotent.

Far-right conservatives and libertarians have been working for this destruction of agencies — the ultimate in deregulation — ever since the first regulatory agencies came into being with the 1906 creation of the Pure Food and Drugs Act, a response to Upton Sinclair’s bestselling horror story published that year (The Jungle) about American slaughterhouses and meat-packing operations.

Gutting these agencies is what Steve Bannon meant when Trump brought him into the White House and he said one of the main goals of that administration was to “deconstruct the administrative state.” If there’s any coherent explanation of the phrase “deep state” as used by Republicans, it’s our nation’s regulatory agencies.

The modern effort to destroy or at least neuter America’s protective agencies began when Ronald Reagan put Anne Gorsuch in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

She directed the agency to dial back restrictions on expansion of factories and other operations that were already polluting the atmosphere. That provoked a challenge to the Supreme Court, Natural Resources Defense Council, v. Gorsuch, where the Court overruled the Reagan administration.

Gorsuch nonetheless continued her efforts to gut the EPA. In her first year heading the agency, there was a 79 percent decline in enforcement cases, and a 69 percent drop in cases the EPA referred to the Justice Department for prosecution. She pushed a 25 percent cut in her own agency’s funding into Reagan’s first budget proposal.

It took Congress years to overturn her cuts to the Clean Air Act “on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers,” according to Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust.

She took a meataxe to President Carter’s renewable energy programs and “set solar back a decade” according to Clapp.

Gorsuch finally resigned her office to avoid prosecution for what Newsweek described as “a nasty scandal involving political manipulation, [Super]fund mismanagement, perjury, and destruction of subpoenaed documents, among other things.”

Her son, Neil Gorsuch, was devastated by his mother’s resignation. In her memoir Are You Tough Enough? she tells the story of how Neil confronted her when she resigned:

“Neil,” she wrote, “got very upset. Halfway through Georgetown prep and smart as a whip, Neil knew from the beginning the seriousness of my problems. He also had an unerring sense of fairness, as do so many people his age.

“‘You should never have resigned,’ he said firmly. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president [Reagan] ordered. Why are you quitting? You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?’

“He was really upset,” she added.

Now, it appears, her son is preparing his revenge.

To get there, he and the other Republicans on the Court appear hell-bent-for-leather to turn regulatory agency rule-making upside-down, which will make the billionaires who give them luxury vacations, buy them homes, and pay them absurd speaking fees (and paid Roberts’ wife over $10 million).

Here’s how regulatory law — using the example of the EPA and CO2 — is supposed to work (in super-simplified form):

1. Congress passes a law that says, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency should limit the damage that pollutants in the environment cause to the planet. Congress (the Constitution’s Article I branch of government) defines the broad goal of the legislation, but the Executive Branch (Article II, which encompasses the EPA and other regulatory agencies) has the responsibility to carry it out.

2. The EPA, part of that Executive Branch and answering both to the law and the President, then convenes panels of experts. They spend a year or more doing an exhaustive, deep dive into the science, coming up with dozens or even hundreds of suggestions to limit atmospheric CO2, ranging from rules on how much emission cars can expel to drilling and refining processes that may leak CO2 or methane (which degrades into CO2), etc.

3. The experts’ suggestions are then run past a panel of rule-making bureaucrats and hired-gun rule-making experts for the EPA to decide what the standards should be. They take into consideration the current abilities of industry and the costs versus the benefits of various rules, among other things.

4. After they’ve come up with those tentative regulations, they submit them for public review and hearings. When that process is done and a consensus is achieved, they make them into official EPA rules, publish them, enforce them, and the CO2 emissions begin to drop.

This is a process that simply comports with common sense, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 when they established what’s called the “Chevron deference” to legitimize and defend our regulatory agencies.

That doctrine — established by the Supreme Court and reflecting a century of the will of Congress and presidents of both parties who signed regulatory agencies into existence — says that when a regulatory agency does its due diligence and determines reasonable rules for a substance or behavior they have the legal authority to regulate, the courts should “defer” to the judgment of the agency.

Congress passes laws that empower regulatory agencies to solve problems, the agencies figure out how to do that and put the rules into place, and the solutions get enforced by the agencies. And when somebody sues to overturn the rules, if the courts determine they were arrived at through a reasonable process without corruption, those rules stand.

Then came a group of rightwing Supreme Court justices — including Neil Gorsuch — who overturned rules made by the EPA about CO2 emissions from power plants in their June, 2022 West Virginia v EPA decision. This set up today’s arguments.

Their rationale was that because the legislation that created the EPA doesn’t specifically mention “regulating CO2,” the agency lacks that power. And now it has lost that power, the result of that West Virginia v EPA decision a year-and-a-half ago.

The coal-, oil-, and natural-gas-fired power plant industry has been popping champagne corks for almost two years now, as CO2 levels continue to increase along with the temperature of our planet.

In addition to Gorsuch, the Court’s decision-makers in West Virginia v EPA included Amy Coney Barrett whose father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades, and John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh who are all on the Court in part because of support from a network funded by fossil fuel billionaires and their industry (among others).

And, of course, Clarence “on the take” Thomas, who supported the Chevron deference 15 years ago but in 2020 wrote:

“Chevron compels judges to abdicate the judicial power without constitutional sanction. … Chevron also gives federal agencies unconstitutional power.”

Giving us a clue to how this will probably go down, all six Republicans on the Court voted to gut the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2; all 3 Democratic nominees opposed the decision.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the Court:

“[D]oes not have a clue about how to address climate change...yet it appoints itself, instead of congress or the expert agency...the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening."

Their ruling was, essentially, that all of that research into the specifics of anticipated regulations — all those hundreds of scientists, millions of public comments, and hundreds of thousands of science-hours invested in understanding problems and coming up with workable solutions — must be done by Congress rather than administrative regulatory agencies.

As if Congress had the time and staff. As if Congress was stocked with scientific experts, a much larger budget, and had millions of hours a year for hearings. As if Republicans in the pockets of fossil fuel billionaires wouldn’t block any congressional action even if it did.

Gorsuch, et al, succeeded in the West Virginia v EPA case, but it was narrowly focused on CO2.

In the case being argued today, however, the Court is explicitly preparing to expand that victory by blowing the entire Chevron deference out of the water, thus ending or severely limiting most protective government regulations in America and opening the door to court challenges to every regulatory agency listed at the open of this article (and more).

They’re saying, essentially, that the EPA (and any other regulatory agency) can’t do all the steps listed above: instead, that detailed and time-consuming analysis of a problem, developing specific solutions, and writing specific rules has to be done, they say, by Congress itself.

Specifically, this case the Court is hearing today — Loper Bright Enterprises v Gina Raimondo — has to do with whether or not fishermen should have to pay fees that help cover the cost of the agency that regulates them.

But when you look at the briefs being filed by billionaire- and corporate-funded rightwing groups like the CATO Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Pacific Legal Foundation, Independent Women’s Law Center, Southeastern Legal Foundation, Christian Employer’s Alliance, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Advancing American Freedom, and the Buckeye Institute, you find the real goal of this litigation.

CATO, for example, writes:

“t is now clear that Chevron deference is unconstitutional and ahistorical. Over the past forty years and counting, it has wreaked havoc in the lower courts upon people and businesses.”

Competitive Enterprise writes of the National Marine Fisheries Service:

“The agency lacks inherent legislative power: it may only use the powers that Congress gives it. … Only Congress can decide if a power given to it by the Constitution should be exercised. … The agency’s attempt to exercise this never- assigned power not only goes beyond the authority Congress gave it; it goes beyond any authority that Congress could legitimately give it.”

Pacific Legal Foundation cuts right to the heart of the ability of agencies to regulate anything, saying the case turns on:

“Whether the Court should overrule Chevron…”

The Buckeye Institute writes they’re submitting their amicus brief to the Court:

“[T]o speak on behalf of the thousands of small businesses concerned with agency aggrandizement of power through Chevron deference…”

On the side of you, me, and most other average Americans who just want clean air and water, safe drugs and cars, and reasonable protections in the workplace, the Biden administration has stepped up.

In defense of America’s regulatory agencies, the federal government’s brief filed with the Court lays out what’s at stake:

“Petitioners bear an especially heavy burden in asking this Court to overrule Chevron, which stands at the head of ‘a long line of precedents’ reaching back decades. The Court in Chevron described its approach not as an innovation, but as the application of “well-settled principles” concerning the respective roles of agencies and courts in resolving statutory ambiguities.

“Federal courts have invoked Chevron in thousands of reported decisions, and Congress has repeatedly legislated against its backdrop. Regulated entities and others routinely rely on agency interpretations that courts have upheld under the Chevron framework.

“By centralizing interpretive decisions in agencies supervised by the President, Chevron also promotes political accountability, national uniformity and predictability, and it respects the expertise agencies can bring to bear in ad- ministering complex statutory schemes.

“Petitioners offer no persuasive ‘special justification’ for overruling Chevron, let alone the type of ‘particularly special justification’ that would be required to overturn such a deeply ingrained part of administrative law.

“Petitioners principally contend that Chevron improperly transfers the authority to ‘say what the law is’ from the Judicial Branch to the Executive Branch. But this Court has explained that the Chevron framework rests on a presumption that ‘a statute’s ambiguity constitutes an implicit delegation from Congress to the agency to fill in the statutory gaps.’ (emphasis mine)

This could be the big enchilada, the case that fundamentally transforms America and American government from a modern, well-functioning nation into a third-world backwater where massive corporations and the billionaires they made rich, instead of We the People through elected representatives, set the rules. It’s corporate America’s dream.

It could fulfill Bannon’s and Trump’s promise to dismantle — or at least eviscerate — most of America’s regulatory agencies, leaving us all subject to the tender mercies of the country’s CEOs.

Several groups have called on Gorsuch to recuse himself from the case because one of his friends and patrons is a billionaire who’ll profit greatly from the destruction of our regulatory agencies. Not to mention fulfilling his mother’s legacy.

So far, though, he doesn’t seem to care about the apparent conflict of interest: the Republicans on this Court seem incapable of feeling shame or behaving ethically.

Keep an eye on this case and pay attention to the reporting on today’s arguments before the Court. Knowing what’s coming down the road — and why, and from whom — may well be vital for those of us concerned with the future of our country and our children’s safety.

(First published at https://hartmannreport.com/p/does-the-epa-die-today-800)

December 7, 2023

Dear GOP: You'll Never Wash the Stink of Trump Off You or Your Party. Never.

Dear Republicans,

After the corruption of the Coolidge and Hoover administrations crashed the world economy, kicking off the Republican Great Depression in 1929, it took your party decades to rid itself of the stink.

After Nixon extended the Vietnam War to get himself re-elected, unnecessarily killing over 20,000 American soldiers and a million Vietnamese civilians, and then got busted for Watergate and the bribes he solicited in the White House, it took you almost a generation to rid yourselves of the stink.

But you’ll never rid yourself of the stink of Donald Trump. At least never in the lifetime of anybody around today. Trump’s stench is a tragic part of American history that will last generations.

The entire world knows the foetor of his whipping up a crowd of thousands to try to assassinate the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the House.

Trump’s minions urinated on the carpets in the hallowed halls of Congress, smeared feces on the walls, damaged priceless paintings from the founding era of our country, and murdered police officers protecting our nation’s Capitol. That stink will never fade, no matter how often his allies try to rewrite history, blur faces, or tell stories about bizarre “deep state” conspiracies.

Did you think Americans would forget the stink of the 30,000+ documented lies he told America and the world while he was president? Or the lies he routinely spouts every time he speaks in public, so frequent now that even Fox “News” has to correct the facts when covering him?

How about the reek of his dictator-like pronouncements that he will destroy the American Civil Service and fill our government with corrupt toadies, then imprison his political enemies and send the military into the streets like Maduro has done in Venezuela and tinpot dictators do all across the world?

Do you really believe that we would forget the stink of his sucking up to murderous dictators like Putin, MBS, and Kim? Now that effluvium is being smeared all over Republican politicians, one after another, as they follow Trump’s orders — which he no doubt received from Putin — to abandon Ukraine.

You are cowards, all. Covered in your wretched, cowardly, unpatriotic stink.

This is the man who tried to blackmail a democratic ally into manufacturing dirt on his political opponent, withholding aid to Ukraine in the face of Russian attacks. The stink of that crime was so heinous he was impeached for it.

What about the stink Trump created when he referred to mostly-Black nations as “shithole countries” and our veterans who’d died in war as “suckers” and “losers”? When he told General Mark Milley he didn’t want to again share the stage with an injured veteran because such heroes don’t “look good”?

Or when, at the height of the pandemic in April 2020, Trump ordered people back to work and began to ridicule wearing masks, leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths (according to his own science advisors: the British journal Lancet put the number at around a half-million)?

At that time, most Covid deaths were in Blue states (CT, NY, WA, NJ) and Trump agreed with Jared that they could politically benefit by blaming the deaths on Democratic governors. An “effective political strategy” they called this decision redolent with the stink of mass death.

That same son-in-law, by the way, who Trump helped hustle $2 billion from the Saudis in exchange, apparently, for downplaying the murder of a Washington Post journalist and looking the other way at how they oppress women. Do you think we failed to notice the reek of nepotism and corruption?

Speaking of women, do you really believe that stink of your support of a man credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by over 20 women, including one as young as 13, would just go away? Even after he was found by a court of law to have raped the first woman whose case finally made it through the courts?

As average working Americans struggle to pay their taxes, Trump pushed through an odious $2 trillion tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies, creating the largest budget deficit by any president in the history of the nation. Do you think America will forget?

Or the stink of his multiple business frauds? He was convicted and forced to pay millions in restitution to victims of his Trump University fraud; they shut down his phony New York charity; now he’s been found by a New York court to have committed bank, tax, and insurance fraud: they’re just trying to figure out how big the stink is so they can quantify it as a fine.

How about the overwhelming stench of tearing babies from their mothers’ arms at the border and then trafficking them into phony “Christian adoption” services that then vanished, leaving over 1000 grieving families still not knowing the whereabouts of their little girls and boys to this day?

Or the stink from the naked campaign lies he blithely told to get votes, promising a new national healthcare system, a revitalization of America’s infrastructure, or his claims that he supported organized labor at the same time his appointees to the Department of Labor were working to block unionization efforts across the nation?

Even worse, this adulterer — who had affairs outside his marriage with every one of his three wives and never goes to church but still claimed to be a Christian — told sincerely religious people he was their champion. Not noticing the sulfurous smell that surrounds Trump, many believed him and still do. In actual fact, he was only championing the hypocritical multimillionaire TV preachers who shared their hustle with him: he supported their violations of tax law in exchange for their endorsement from the pulpit.

Then he tried to overthrow an election he knew he lost by 7 million votes, and is today threatening to try it again. The whole world is aghast at the stink of that tinpot dictator effort, and terrified that he may succeed the next time.

Germans still struggle with the stink of a leader who referred to his political opponents as “vermin” and promised he was going to “root them out.” Who attacked the press because they told the truth about him. Who played on and amplified people’s fear of “the other.” You will, too, for generations after Trump himself has shuffled off this mortal coil.

Pathetically, you Republican members of Congress have now smeared yourselves with the slime that has surrounded Donald Trump his entire criminal life. Have you noticed how many of your colleagues are fleeing? Do you really think you can ever wash off yourself the reek of your association with treason, an attempt to betray and overthrow America, even worse than what Benedict Arnold tried?

Seriously, Republicans, do you not think America can smell what’s going on? Trump bragging that he ended women’s rights to bodily autonomy? His promotion of guns and assault weapons because the racist nutcases who follow him think they’re going to be soldiers in a coming civil war? His refusal to do anything about the climate change that is now killing Americans every day?

America has had a few truly awful presidents. Andrew Jackson “The Indian Killer.” Andrew Johnson who tried to undo Lincoln’s legacy. Calvin Coolidge and Teapot Dome. Richard Nixon’s criminality, Ronald Reagan’s commitment to destroy America’s middle class, George W. Bush lying us into two wars as part of his 2004 re-election strategy.

But none stink as bad as this miserable cartoon of a man, with his bizarre orange spray-tan, absurd comb-over, and compensatory phallic-length red ties.

America is not going to forget, and many Americans will never forgive.

You will never wash the stink of Donald Trump off yourselves or your party. Never.

October 18, 2023

How the Fossil Fuel Industry Pays for Lies to School Children

The fossil fuel industry has not just bought US senators and members of congress; it’s even buying school board and state board of education members. And, in some states, they’re demanding books or course instruction materials that explicitly lie — or at least confuse students — about the connection between fossil fuels and our climate emergency.

You can thank Clarence Thomas, the most corrupt Supreme Court justice in American history, for this one. After years of wining-and-dining from billionaires who would really, really like to be able to buy their very own politicians, in 2010 Thomas was the tie-breaking vote to legalize political bribery in the Citizens United decision, as I lay out in detail in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

A 2019 NPR/Ipsos poll found that four out of five Americans — and two out of three Republicans — believe our schoolchildren should be taught accurate scientific information about the known and well-documented relationship between climate change and fossil fuels. Yet, the fossil fuel industry has inserted itself deeply into the schoolbook selection process, to the detriment of our children and their future.

Texas is the epicenter right now, although other Red states are following their lead. Texas is one of the nation’s largest purchasers of schoolbooks, so their influence on which books are used elsewhere in the nation is huge.

The last time Texas re-evaluated their public school textbooks was 2009, and, like now, the battleground was around science. Specifically what’s called the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS): the core standards for what must be in textbooks and thus taught in Texas classrooms.

The battle back in 2009 was over evolution. The Texas State Board of Education was chaired by a dentist and avowed “young earth creationist” (people who believe the universe was created by their god around 6,000 years ago) named Don McLeroy. When the topic of evolution came up, he declared in a public meeting, “Somebody’s got to stand up to experts!”

When a reporter asked him how he responded to the overwhelming evidence that the Earth is warming because of fossil fuels, McLeroy’s response was, “[C]onservatives like me think the evidence is a bunch of hooey.”

Fast-forward ten years to the 2019 textbook debate and McLeroy had moved on, but many members of the board appear to still hold his position that climate change, like evolution, is “hooey.”

People affiliated with a front group for the fossil fuel industry weighed in heavily at several critical junctures in the process, arguing that instead of teaching the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, teachers should tell students that all forms of energy have both costs and benefits, including renewables, and that climate change has been historically caused by natural variations in the earth’s atmosphere.

While all technically true, the main (and desired) effect of emphasizing these positions while removing the scientific consensus is to cause children to think that there’s no urgency about lowering (or ending) the use of fossil fuels. Let the profits continue to roll!

The board largely adopted their recommendations, and now Texas is looking at which textbooks will meet their criteria. As noted by the Editorial Board of The Washington Post in a scathing takedown of the process last month:

“Will Hickman, a Republican [Texas school] board member who works as a senior legal counsel for the oil giant Shell, asked whether Texas textbooks should also discuss the benefits from burning fossil fuels, given that modern life is still powered by hydrocarbons such as oil and gas. Patricia Hardy, another board member, said at a board meeting that students should learn that fossil fuels and naturally occurring climatic changes can both lead to increasing temperatures, which would downplay conclusive research showing fossil fuel use is rapidly warming the planet.”

In Florida, presidential wannabee Ron DeSantis didn’t even wait for a cumbersome process like Texas goes through every ten years.

He simply ordered his education people to authorize videos and other content to be used to teach science in that state’s schools. As the Post editorial noted, “Florida approved for use material from the conservative Prager University Foundation, which includes climate change denial videos.”

In North Carolina, Republicans tried this spring to replace Earth Sciences — which would expose students to the concept of climate change — with Computer Science as one of the three science classes required to graduate.

As Republican State Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt told the state’s House K-12 Education Committee last February:

“Of all the things that keep me up at night, eliminating earth science isn’t necessarily one of them if it means we could replace it with computer science.”

In May of this year, climate change survived an effort to remove it altogether from Utah’s public schools by an 8 to 7 single vote margin. Few doubt the fossil fuel industry won’t be back next year to remedy that.

None of this could have happened if it weren’t for the sad reality that it’s almost impossible to find an elected Republican at the state or federal level who is willing to admit that the science linking our deadly weather to burning fossil fuels is real. Rejecting climate science is the price of admission to today’s GOP: fossil fuel billionaires have built much of the political infrastructure and provide many of the campaign contributions, state and federal, that sustain the party in election after election.

Political bribery was a felony crime in the United States virtually from the beginning of our republic. The first strengthening of those anti-bribery laws came in 1867, when Congress outlawed politicians from taking money from Navy Yard workers.

Those laws were strengthened repeatedly at both the federal and state levels over the past 156 years, including dozens of prohibitions at the state level on corporations bribing politicians.

Teddy Roosevelt’s 1907 Tillman Act, for example, made it a federal crime for any corporation to give any money or other support to any candidate for federal office:

“It is unlawful for any … corporation organized by authority of any law of Congress, to make a contribution or expenditure in connection with any election to any political office, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office, or for any corporation whatever, or any labor organization, to make a contribution or expenditure in connection with any election at which presidential and vice presidential electors or a Senator or Representative in, or a Delegate or Resident Commissioner to, Congress are to be voted for, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any of the foregoing offices, or for any candidate, political committee, or other person knowingly to accept or receive any contribution prohibited by this section, or any officer or any director of any corporation … to consent to any contribution or expenditure by the corporation … prohibited by this section.” [emphasis mine]

Numerous state laws echoed the Tillman Act and other anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws. For example, Wisconsin’s law was quite explicit:

“No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office.

“Any officer, employee, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation, who shall violate this act, shall be punished upon conviction … by imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years … and if a domestic corporation it may be dissolved … and if a foreign or non-resident corporation its right to do business in this state may be declared forfeited.” [emphasis mine]

Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, however, struck down that and over a hundred other state and federal anti-bribery laws in their corrupt 2010 Citizens United decision. As mentioned, Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote (with John Roberts’ concurrence).

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the main dissent, pointing out how corrupt the decision itself was:

“The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution. … These concerns are heightened when judges overrule settled doctrine upon which the legislature has relied.

“The Court operates with a sledge hammer rather than a scalpel when it strikes down one of Congress’ most significant efforts to regulate the role that corporations and unions play in electoral politics. It compounds the offense by implicitly striking down a great many state laws as well.”

He added that the decision defining corporations as “persons” with rights under the First Amendment and money as protected “free speech” is bizarre in the extreme and predicted the exact corruption that we’re seeing today, including foreign governments and overseas oligarchs setting up US companies to buy off American legislators:

“If taken seriously, our colleagues’ assumption that the identity of a speaker has no relevance to the Government’s ability to regulate political speech would lead to some remarkable conclusions. Such an assumption would have accorded the propaganda broadcasts to our troops by ‘Tokyo Rose’ during World War II the same protection as speech by Allied commanders.

“More pertinently, it would appear to afford the same protection to multinational corporations controlled by foreigners as to individual Americans: To do otherwise, after all, could ‘enhance the relative voice’ of some (i.e. humans) over others ( i.e. nonhumans). Under the majority’s view, I suppose it may be a First Amendment problem that corporations are not permitted to vote, given that voting is, among other things, a form of speech.”

Nonetheless, that breathtaking decision striking down over 150 years of anti-bribery laws and prohibitions on corporate electioneering, with both Roberts’ and Thomas’ full endorsement, stands and is now US law.

In the wake of that decision, state courts were forced to strike down similar anti-bribery laws in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

As a result, today Democrats in the “corporate problem solver’s” caucus and the entire Republican caucus in both the US House and Senate along with virtually every Republican in every state house and senate in America are on the take from the highest corporate or billionaire bidders.

That’s a huge backstop for state board of education members, many of whom themselves were elected with money from fossil fuel corporations or fossil fuel billionaires.

If it weren’t for the ability to bribe politicians and school board members with impunity, we’d have honest science textbooks in Red states; instead, their children are being criminally dumbed down and misinformed.

Stripping out the damage Thomas and Roberts did to our republic with this decision won’t be easy or quick. When Democrats passed out of the House the For The People Act in 2022 that would have placed slight limits on dark money in politics, every single Republican in both the House and Senate voted against it.

It failed to become law because Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin — both deeply corrupted Senators — refused to vote to break a Republican filibuster. The money they received to incentivize their votes was made possible by — you guessed it — Citizens United.

Democrats are committed to trying again, and to taking even larger steps to reverse this corrupt SCOTUS ruling. But to get there they’ll need a much larger majority in the Senate, to hold the White House, and to regain control of the House of Representatives.

The upcoming 2024 election will be the most expensive in world history because of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court. And it will almost certainly be our last chance to rescue America and American democracy from the corruption of big money.
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Links to all sources in the article are here.

October 17, 2023

Why It's Impossible for Right-Wing Governments to Handle a Crisis

Over at The New York Times yesterday, Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the horrors of the past two weeks and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go.

“All this is happening,” she notes in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.”

She then quotes a Tel Aviv author, Dorit Rabinyan, who speaks of the sobering reality Israelis are facing because they’d chosen Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister:

“We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in. … We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there.”

What happened? Instead of taking seriously now-confirmed warnings about a coming Hamas attack shared by Egyptian and, apparently, US intelligence, the prime minister was instead occupied by “months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy.”

And even now, she notes, one of the great frustrations of Israeli citizens is “Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal so far to openly accept any responsibility for the Oct. 7 disaster.”

Netanyahu’s authoritarianism and corruption are making it more difficult for Israel to deal with the horrific crisis Hamas has inflicted upon them. To deal with the crisis, he had to surrender some power to form a coalition/crisis government.

Here in the US, we had a similar experience, although, unfortunately, nobody moderated the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration. President George W. Bush and his Vice President, Dick Cheney, were repeatedly warned that Bin Laden was “determined to strike inside the US.”

Bush, however, was busy trying to get Congress to pass a trillion-dollar tax cut for billionaires and Cheney was in secret meetings drawing up maps of the Iraqi oil fields that he and George would pass out to crony companies if they could find an excuse for a war.

Bush got his final and most alarmed warning from the CIA on August 6, 2001, a full month before the attack. Instead of putting the FBI and airport security on full alert, Bush decided to leave DC and take the longest vacation in presidential history, keeping him out of town until after the attack.

This was all just one month after Bush had attended a G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, where the Italian government had mobilized a battery of anti-aircraft missiles to protect the venue because of credible threats that Osama Bin Laden was planning to have his men hijack passenger jets to crash into Bush’s hotel, a threat that was well known to Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

Similarly, Donald Trump was warned by both China and his own scientists in December of 2019 and again in January of 2020 about how deadly and contagious Covid was and how it could potentially kill over a million Americans. He largely ignored the warnings (other than telling Bob Woodward about it), instead attending rallies and doing rightwing media hits non-stop, until hospitals in New York and Connecticut were having to use refrigerated trucks as morgues.

After only one month (March) of paying attention to his scientists and locking down the country, when the April 7th, 2020, New York Times front page headline proclaimed that the majority of non-geriatric Covid victims were Black people in Blue states, Jared Kushner came up with the bright idea that letting people die and blaming it on Democratic governors would be “an effective political strategy.”

Thus, that was the week Trump ended the lock-downs and began pushing people back to work, leading America to suffer the highest Covid mortality rate in the world with at least 500,000-700,000 unnecessary deaths. People who believe Trump continue to get sick and die to this day because of his lies about Covid: citizens today in Red counties are twice as likely to die of the disease as are Americans living in Blue counties.

The common denominator between Bush, Netanyahu, and Trump — and all the unnecessary deaths on all their watches — is that all three are corrupt far-right demagogic politicians who put their own personal wealth and power above the good of their nation.

That is, by and large, the norm for rightwing governments worldwide. Because they generally rule against the will of large parts of their populations, they instead spend their time figuring out ways to raid the public treasury or exploit their position in government to hang onto power.

Examples include:

— Bush’s attempt to hand the 2.6 trillion-dollar Social Security trust fund over to New York banks;
— Cheney’s massive military bailout of the company he’d nearly bankrupted as CEO and his desire to seize Iraq’s oil fields on its behalf;
— Netanyahu’s multiple corrupt deals for which he’s now under indictment,
— Trump’s hustling Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar for billions to be paid out via his son-in-law and the LIV Golf Tour, his kids hustling Trump properties from the White House, his relentless lies while in office, etc.

It turns out that philosophies of governance matter. Hugely.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference” and Democratic administrations have taken it to heart ever since that 1933 speech.

When Democrats have control of Congress and the White House they pass all sorts of legislation to advance the public good, aid workers, care for the poor and disabled, strengthen public education, and provide for the needs of ordinary people. Occasionally they overreach or their programs don’t work or even backfire; they then fix them or try something different.

When rightwingers run our government, though, they pass laws like Taft-Hartley that gutted union rights, rip up voting rights, make it easier for fossil fuel companies to pollute and timber companies to clear-cut, and dial back people’s access to welfare and healthcare programs. And, of course, start wars (Grenada, Iraq/Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq) and pass tax cuts for their billionaire patrons.

Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton, Obama, and Biden all proposed and put into law sweeping programs to build America and enhance the public good ranging from Social Security, the right to unionize, the minimum wage, Medicare, food stamps, Medicaid and greater funding for education.

Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump all went for tax cuts for billionaires and worked to gut or privatize the agencies, infrastructure, and programs Democrats had set up.

There’s a reason for this.

— Leftwing governments believe in democracy, and so try to accomplish what’s best for the majority of people while protecting the rights of the minority; rightwing governments practice autocracy on behalf of the morbidly rich. Sometimes, like the old USSR or modern Venezuela, repressive and authoritarian rightwing governments pretend to be left-wing, but the police state aspects of their governance give the game away.

— Rightwingers don’t see democracy as a benefit or even an ideal; they see it as an impediment to further comforting the already-comfortable while enriching themselves in the process. Instead of building up disaster preparedness through strengthening, for example, FEMA, they work to redirect those government dollars back to their friends through things like $600 billion a year in oil industry subsidies and over $20 trillion (cumulatively) in Republican tax cuts to billionaires since 1981.

The result — when rightwingers are in charge — is government that’s not paying attention to real threats and, when they come, responds with profound incompetence or cynical exploitation. Bush and “heckofajob Brownie”; Netanyahu and Gaza; Trump and Covid, or his cynically tossing paper towels at hurricane victims.

Bush was not only incompetent in allowing 9/11 to happen despite multiple warnings that he refused to respond to, but when it did happen he tried to use it to his own political advantage and that of his Vice President by lying us into two unnecessary and illegal wars. After all, way back in 1999, as he was still planning his run for the White House, he told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Rightwing governments rarely put the good of the people of a nation first; instead, it’s axiomatic that they achieve and wield power by scapegoating minority groups — usually racial or religious — and suppressing both voting rights and the rights of women to full participation in society.

While there have been a few self-declared left-wing authoritarian kleptocracies in history (most notably the USSR), the vast majority have been rightwing in their origin and nature. And, over time as their corruption becomes evident, their citizens grow to hate them.

In fact, over the past few years Spain, Brazil, and most recently Poland have rejected rightwing, bigoted, kleptocratic governments in favor of a return to normalcy and a progressive democracy. Israel could be next. The United States took a big step in that direction three years ago when we overwhelmingly rejected Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, the hard right here in America has funding from multiple “libertarian” billionaires, social media oligarchs, and a bought-off and corrupt Supreme Court that has legalized political bribery, making it much harder to dislodge authoritarian Republicans.

In fact, here in America, Jim Jordan is about to reboot Donald Trump’s attempt to damage Americas readiness and defense of democracies around the world if he achieves the speakership.

A popular meme today, predictive of the dysfunction of the Trump administration and the GOP-run House of Representatives, is: “Elect a clown, expect a circus.”

But a much wider and internationalized perspective could rewrite it as: “Elect a right-winger, expect a poorly-handled crisis and an explosion of great wealth at the top.”
—————————————-
All the links are here.

October 16, 2023

Will "Speaker" Gym Jordan Create an "Axis of Evil" with Trump & Putin-Aligned MAGA GOP?

Republicans appear on the verge of picking Jim Jordan as the next Speaker of the House of Representatives; if they do, they’ll be putting Donald Trump, by proxy, in charge of the House half of Congress.

This is a true danger to our republic and an embarrassment in front of the rest of the world.

Trump is a convicted rapist and sexual predator. With this decision, Republicans would put a man who stands accused with covering up the sexual assault of multiple students when he was a wrestling coach as Trump’s front man in Congress.

You’d have thought that after Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert went to prison for what Jordan is accused of covering up, the GOP would have figured out this isn’t a good look, but, no.

Trump is an unrepentant liar who continues to lie literally every day and has used deceit as the foundation of his strategy to build his business empire. Jordan also casually lies and distorts the truth — loudly and publicly — to satisfy his own lust for wealth and power.

Jordan has lied:

— Claiming in 2020 that Democrats were preparing to steal the election (a meme Trump was promoting then, too, as both saw the polls showing that Trump would lose the election).
— Taking Putin and Trump’s side in defending the Russian terrorist attack on Ukraine.
— Promoting a Russian lie that then-Vice President Biden got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to help out Hunter Biden (the reality was literally the opposite).
— Arguing that Social Security and Medicare must be “reformed” (cut) to keep the programs solvent when simply having rich people pay the same FICA tax as the rest of us would solve any problems.
— Trying to blow up Fani Willis’ investigation of Trump’s alleged crime of demanding the Georgia secretary of state “find” over 11,000 votes.
— Siding with Trump and his Republican conspiracy to overthrow our government on January 6th.
— Telling false stories about “Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
— Smearing Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein as he led an effort to impeach Rosenstein for investigating Trump’s ties to Putin.
— Advancing a strategy to gin up an impeachment effort against President Biden.
— Supporting a corrupt strategy by Wisconsin Republicans to impeach the new Chief Justice of that state’s Supreme Court.
— Helping cover up revelations of fraud in Donald Trump’s tax returns.
— Participating at the center of the conspiracy to storm the Capitol and then voting not to certify President Biden as the legal winner of the 2020 election.
— Alleging that the Biden administration was targeting “Catholic traditionalists” for punishment by the IRS.
— Smearing the IRS and their efforts to get billionaires to pay the taxes they owe.

But don’t just take it from me. here’s what Liz Cheney, no Democratic shill, says about Jordan:

“Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6th than any other member of the House of Representatives. Jim Jordan was involved, was part of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged as he attempted to overturn the election.”

She and former Republican Congressman Adam Kinsinger wrote on Twitter/X:

“Jim Jordan was involved in Trump’s conspiracy to steal the election and seize power; he urged that Pence refuse to count lawful electoral votes. If Rs nominate Jordan to be Speaker, they will be abandoning the Constitution.”

He then refused to honor a subpoena from the January 6th Committee and is still in contempt of Congress for his cowardice.

Former Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) wrote in his 2021 book about Jordan, who he called a “legislative terrorist”:

“I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart — never building anything, never putting anything together.”

As Dan Friedman and David Corn wrote for Mother Jones:

“Jordan was an early and enthusiastic recruit in Trump’s war on the republic and reality—in public and in private.

“Days after the November election, he spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally in front of the Pennsylvania state capitol. He spread election conspiracy theories within right-wing media. He endorsed Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s bogus claims that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic had robbed Trump of electoral victory. He called for a congressional investigation of electoral fraud for which there was no evidence and demanded a special counsel be appointed. He endorsed state legislatures canceling vote tallies and selecting their own presidential electors. He urged Trump not to concede. He demanded Congress not certify Joe Biden’s victory in the ceremony scheduled for January 6, 2021.”

During the 2019 impeachment probe into Trump blackmailing Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to fabricate dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden, Jordan helped criminally storm a secure room in the Capitol where evidence against Trump was held, delaying the proceedings by hours.

The stunt prompted cybersecurity concerns because Jordan and Gaetz brought people without security clearances carrying cellphones with cameras into the top-secret secured SCIF, prompting Congressman Eric Swalwell to note:

“They not only brought in their unauthorized bodies, they may have brought in the Russians and the Chinese with electronics into a secure space, which will require that the space at some point in time be sanitized.”

As a reward for Jordan’s loyal service to Trump’s MAGA/Putin cause, in his final weeks as president the Orange Rapist awarded him the rare Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor established by President Kennedy for people who have given outstanding service to America in the fields of national security and world peace.

As anybody who has ever watched a hearing chaired by Jordan knows, he is an unrepentant bully who will say or do nearly anything to win an argument or get his way. It’s so well known that the Politico headline says it bluntly: “Will Jim Jordan bully his way to the speakership?”

Jordan has been in Congress for 16 years and gone from being an Ohio wrestling coach to having a net worth of over $30 million; he has sponsored four pieces of legislation in all that time, none of which became law.

The Children’s Defense Fund notes that Jordan has been no friend to America’s families and youth, cataloging part of his voting record just last year:

— voted against H.R.1 the For the People Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.5984 the IDEA Full Funding Act.
— voted against H.R.7989 the Protecting Infants from Formula Shortages Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.5080 the Secure Background Checks Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.4464 the Fighting Homelessness Through Services and Housing Act.
— voted against H.R.4837 the Honoring Family-Friendly Workplaces Act.
— voted against H.R.128 the RAISE Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.131 the Kalief’s Law.
— voted against H.R.137 the Mental Health Access and Gun Violence Prevention Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.1603 the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.1620 the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.1808 the Assault Weapons Ban of 2022.
— voted against H.R.2377 the Federal Extreme Risk Protection Order Act of 2021.
— voted against H.R.3617 the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act.
— voted against H.R.5129 the Community Services Block Grant Modernization Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.5305 the Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act.
— voted against H.R.5746 the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act.
— voted against H.R.6531 the Targeting Resources to Communities in Need Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.7309 the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.7780 the Mental Health Matters Act.
— voted against H.R.7790 the Infant Formula Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2022.
— voted against H.R.7910 the Protecting Our Kids Act.
— voted against H.R.8326 the Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act.
— voted against H.R.8404 the Respect for Marriage Act.
— voted against H.R.8542 the Mental Health Justice Act of 2022.
— voted against H.R.8876 the Jackie Walorski Maternal and Child Home Visiting Reauthorization Act of 2022.

An Ohio newspaper warns that putting Jordan in the Speaker’s position, two heartbeats away from the presidency, will create an “Axis of Evil” between Trump, Jordan, and the other Putin-aligned MAGA Republicans in that body.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s former Editorial Director wrote:

“Placing second in the line of presidential succession, a man willing to besmirch everything America stands for in service of Trump by rights should prove too risky for many of the House’s 221 Republican members.”

Truer words were never spoken. Jim Jordan represents a real and existential threat to democracy in our country, the rights of women and minorities, and peace in the world.
For hot links to all the back up sources in this article, the original is at: https://hartmannreport.com/p/will-speaker-gym-jordan-create-an-445

August 31, 2022

Starting a nationwide "Indictment Party"?

Anybody have ideas on how to start a movement for upscale Democrats across the nation to call their local bar and say, “Here’s my credit card; drinks on the house when the indictment of Donald Trump is announced and charge it to me without mentioning my name.”

May 26, 2022

Dear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS. Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster then than any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation; nearly free college, trade school, and research support; healthy small and family businesses; unions protecting a third of America’s workers so two-thirds had a living wage and benefits; and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports that transformed the nation’s commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class.

The seeds of today’s American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous “Powell Memo.” It became a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon’s Republican Party and then America.

They then moved on to infiltrate our universities, seize our media, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to add millions of votes, and turn upside down our tax, labor, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).

Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked:

Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would “trickle down” benefits to everybody else as, they said, the “job creators” would be unleashed on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we’ve now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over 40 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us.

Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted wherever they wanted it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

“An armed society is a polite society” was the bumper sticker back during Reagan’s time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the 2nd Amendment into the Constitution so “patriots” could kill politicians. Five Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a “polite” society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world.

Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools and outlawed abortion, we’d return to “the good old days” when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we’ve ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and — now that abortion is illegal in state after state — a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we’d “liberate” our young people to focus instead on science and math.

Instead, we’ve raised two generations of Americans that can’t even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution’s reference to the “General Welfare.”

Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education — which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a student’s tuition — so that students would have what they told us was “skin in the game,” we’d see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students when, we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by student’s tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families. While students are underwater, banksters who donate to Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable loans .

Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and better.

Instead, we’ve seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it’s impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It’s all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.

Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they’d be “more invested” in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Instead, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives — while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss.

Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we’d have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small group of often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as you can imagine, are generally absent.

Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor’s suggestions they’d approve and which they’d reject. They said this will “lower costs and increase choice.”

In all of the entire developed world — all the OECD countries on 4 continents — there are only 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Every single one of them is here in America.

Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan’s Great Republican Experiment.

Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated — NAFTA — and then signed off on the WTO, that we’d see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were torn down or left vacant because their products were moved to China or elsewhere. Over 10 million good-paying jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they’re still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn’t do anything to interfere with the profits of their friends in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming — a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. They succeeded in delaying action on global warming by at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

And then, of course, there’s the biggest GOP lie of them all: “Money is the same thing as Free Speech.”

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would “strengthen and diversify” the range of voices heard in America.

It’s diversified it, for sure. We’re now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn’t been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by five Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience.

And now that we know what it is, we’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever they’re calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.

We’re over it, Republicans. A new America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and you can’t stop it much longer.

July 24, 2021

From the 1870s to the 1950s the "race extinction" theory was widely embraced in the US...

When I did the research on this and read Hoffman's book, I was truly shocked, and I thought I was way past that at my age...

https://twitter.com/Thom_Hartmann/status/1418958763797610496

July 13, 2021

Death is Their Election Strategy

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, “A surprising amount of death will occur soon...” But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?

There’s always a reason. People don’t do things — particularly things involving a lot of effort and a need for consistency — without a reason. It just doesn’t happen. No matter how bizarre, twisted or dysfunctional the reason may be, there’s always a reason.

Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last Sunday, “I don’t have a really good reason why this [unwillingness to get vaccinated] is happening.”

But even if he can’t think of a reason why Republicans would trash talk vaccination and people would believe them, it’s definitely there.

Which is why it’s important to ask a couple of simple questions that all point to the actual reason why Republicans and their media are discouraging people from getting vaccinated:

1. Why did Trump get vaccinated in secret after Joe Biden won the election and his January 6th coup attempt failed?

2. Why are Fox “News” personalities discouraging people from getting vaccinated while refusing to say if they and the people they work with have been protected by vaccination?

3. Why was one of the biggest applause lines at CPAC: “They were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated and it isn’t happening!”

4. Why are Republican legislators in states around the country pushing laws that would “ban” private businesses from asking to see proof of vaccination status (they call it “banning vaccine passports”)?

5. Why, when President Biden suggested sending volunteers door-to-door into low-vaccination communities to let people know how and where they could get vaccinated, did rightwing media go nuts about “government thugs” coming to your door to “force” vaccines on you?

6. Why are about half of all the Republicans in Congress refusing to say if they’ve gotten a vaccine or not? For that matter, why do the CPAC speakers who are trashing vaccines refuse to say if they’re vaccinated or not?

7. Why would a Newsmax host trash-talk vaccines saying, “I feel like a vaccination in a weird way is just generally kind of going against nature”?

8. Why did Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota downplay the dangers of Covid last week by bragging that she never shut her state down (and Ron DeSantis did) when SD has 230 Covid deaths per 100,000 people while similar low-population states like Vermont and Oregon are at 41 and 66 deaths per 100,000 respectively?

I hope I’m proven wrong on this, but the only possible explanation I can see for all this activity that seems so well-coordinated and largely consistent is that they all think there’s something in it for them. And what might that be?

Political power. And, of course, the eventual wealth that often comes with political power, particularly corrupt power. Retired Republicans make a lot of money.

Put simply, I believe these Republicans are trying to promote outbreaks of Covid in America to soften or damage Joe Biden’s red-hot economy on the assumption that if the economy tanks then people will vote out Democrats and vote in Republicans in 2022 and 2024.

As Pat Buchanan wrote today: “Are the Democrats headed for their Little Bighorn, with President Joe Biden as Col. Custer? The wish, you suggest, is father to the thought.”

They’re not just willing to let tens or hundreds of thousands of Americans die just to win the next two elections, they’re actively encouraging that outcome.

Death is their electoral strategy.

Is there any other possible explanation?

They’re not stupid (although they’re banking on their audience being, at least, poorly informed) and most have college degrees (and Lauren Boebert finally got her GED). Even if a few of them fell down the Facebook or YouTube rabbit hole into anti-vaxxer territories, they still have no shortage of actual medical experts and staffers who know how to use Google available to them.

It’s remotely possible they just hate and want to damage the US, and a few who are pushing vaccine “hesitancy” like Ron Johnson and John Kennedy recently celebrated the 4th of July in Moscow, but it’s unlikely that they’d take the chance of coordinating with a foreign power to kill Americans (even if much of the foreign troll activity on social media is also trashing vaccines to American social media users).

A bizarre faux masculinity could be behind it, the way Trump tried to promote the idea that only wimps wear masks, but, seriously, do you really think these folks are taking fashion/appearance tips from an obese geriatric guy with a huge comb-over who wears absurd amounts of makeup, contacts, men’s diapers and false teeth? And what’s “masculine” about slowly dying by drowning in your own snot? Or becoming unable to get an erection, as happens to a significant number of men who get Covid?

It’s certainly not fear of, or concern about, the vaccine itself; whether they’ll admit it or not, virtually all of these Republicans and media stars telling people to be afraid of getting a shot have been secretly vaccinated themselves, just like Trump and his family were in January. As CNN Medical Analyst, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, said, “Over 100 members of Congress, all of them GOP members, refuse to tell their constituents whether they have been vaccinated. They’ve all been vaccinated, every single one of those characters have been vaccinated.”

This also has nothing to do with “conservative” ideology. Vaccination has been a part of the American landscape since George Washington ordered his troops inoculated against smallpox during the Revolutionary war, and Republican President Dwight Eisenhower (and his VP, Richard Nixon) had schoolchildren across the nation get the polio vaccine in the 1950s (I was one of them who lined up in school to get it and remember it well).

As California governor, Ronald Reagan oversaw a public school system that required vaccination for admission and conservatives like Bill Kristol and George W. Bush are proudly vaccinated against Covid. Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child, said, “As a victim of polio myself, I’m a big fan of vaccinations, and if I were a parent who had a child … being subject to getting any particular disease, I would come down on the side of vaccinations.” This is not about fearing or not understanding vaccines.

They’re certainly not being paid by “big Pharma” to trash vaccines, and you can bet your last dollar that the billionaires who pay for big Republican events are not only themselves vaccinated but have made sure the entire staff of their multiple mansions, from the cooks to the pool boys to the masseuses and the live-in chefs are all vaccinated.

So, what’s left?

Politics, and the power and money that derive from it.

The reason why Donald Trump spent much of 2020 desperately encouraging people to keep shopping and working was because he knew that when an economy collapses in the 18 months before an election, the party in power always loses.

In his desperation to get the economy back in shape, Trump even issued an executive order forcing mostly Black and Hispanic meat-packing and slaughterhouse employees back to work under threat of imprisonment.

But, sure enough, the economy tanked anyway and Democrats now control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives.

Thus, it appears that today’s entire GOP strategy of encouraging “vaccine hesitancy” is to try to replicate that dynamic, to tank the economy, only this time in a way that works in favor of Republicans.

Encouraging Americans to die so they can win elections. That’s how low today’s GOP has sunk.

(Original post with hotlinks to references at HartmannReport.com

July 9, 2021

Oligarchy: When Brutal Capitalism Becomes More Important than Democracy

In an oligarchy, the rich can get away with anything and average people who try to stop harms to themselves and their communities get crushed. We’re now there; the question is whether we’ll pull back from this horror show, or whether it’ll continue its evolution toward a full-blown police state.

The Sackler family, whose criminal Oxycontin drug-dealing killed over a half-million Americans and destroyed the lives of millions more, is close to a deal with the states to keep around $10 billion of their ill-gotten gain in exchange for giving the states a bit over $4 billion over a nine years. Nobody will go to jail or even suffer an inconvenience like no longer being able to use a private jet or give up one of their many mansions.

And it’s not like they were caught in a one-off crime. In 2007, they reached a settlement with the government over their illegal and deadly marketing practices, promising to behave like good citizens. Then, as the Washington Post noted yesterday:

“The family members — including Richard Sackler, David Sackler, Mortimer D.A. Sackler, Kathe Sackler and Jonathan Sackler (who is now deceased) — demanded in 2012 that company executives come up with a plan to generate greater revenue in response to slumping sales, according to the Justice Department settlement.”

Recidivists. Repeat criminals. Billionaires. But because the crime they committed was mostly against average Americans rather than against big companies or rich people, they’ll quietly retire to one of their chalets or mansions.

Meanwhile, Jessica Reznicek was just sentenced to serve 8 years in prison for damaging an oil pipeline that she believed threatened the water supply of Iowa and surrounding regions and is contributing to climate change. Nobody died. Nobody got addicted. She didn’t make any money doing it. She’s not rich.

Instead, she was trying to save lives and prevent further ecocide. During her sentencing this week, Jessica said, “The toxins we enter into our waterways here in Iowa enter into the Mississippi, which enters into the Gulf [of Mexico]. … Going to this extreme was out of character for me.”

Ironically, on the same day she was sentenced a senior Exxon executive and lobbyist told a reporter that his company had no intention of going along with a carbon tax and that he could stop any kind of serious climate legislation because, with his company’s billions, he had about a dozen senators, including Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, in his back pocket.

The death toll from the “heat dome” caused in part by Exxon’s product (and their decades of funding climate denialism every bit as horrific as the Sackler’s marketing efforts for Oxycontin) has now officially killed over 116 people in Oregon, probably twice that in Washinton State (which has a much larger population), and over 500 people in British Columbia.

Nobody from Exxon is going to jail or even paying a fine, while the fossil-fuel money keeps rolling in to Manchin and Sinema. And if the voters try to mobilize to do anything about it, the Supreme Court said last week, Republican election officials can simply purge them from the voter rolls, make sure they face 8 to 10 hour lines to vote, or go to prison if they make a single mistake.

What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year Reagan-started transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs.

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program. I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.“

That philosophy (of capitalism being more important than “We the People” democracy), has held the Republican Party in its thrall for the past 40 years, and has brought America to this moment of great crisis and danger.

It has transformed America from a democracy to an oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible. And that presents a true crisis for America, because oligarchy is almost always merely a transitional phase in the evolution of full-blown tyranny and/or fascism.

Oligarchies are inherently unstable forms of government because they transfer resources from working people to the oligarchs. Average people, seeing that they’re constantly falling behind, first become cynical and disengage, and when things get bad enough they try to revolt.

That “revolution” can either lead to the oligarchy failing and the nation flipping back to democracy, as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s, or it can flip into full-blown strong-man tyranny, as happened recently in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, and nearly happened here on January 6th.

Oligarchies almost always become police states where any average person who dares seriously challenge the ruling oligarchs is squashed like a bug, while the oligarchs themselves are immune from prosecution and get to keep their billions regardless of how many people die because of their crimes.

Oligarchic governments almost always do a few predictable things, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy:

* They change laws and regulations so their rich buddies can take control of most of the media.

* They stack the courts and regulatory agencies with oligarch-friendly ideologues or outright corrupt toadies, while massively eliminate regulatory protections for average citizens.

* They cut taxes on the rich and drive wages low on working people while criminalizing and cracking down on dissent, particularly if it involves any sort of direct action or property damage.

* They distract voters from their own looting by demonizing minorities and encouraging racism and regionalism.

* They actively suppress the vote among people inclined to oppose them (typically minorities and the young), or outright rig the vote to insure their own victory.

* And they transform their nations into police states, heavily criminalizing demonstrations, nonviolent resistance or “direct action” property damage while radicalizing and encouraging rightwing vigilante “militias” to put down the inevitable rebellions as people realize what’s happening.

To stop this trend, Congress and the White House must take definite steps to undo a series of disastrous Supreme Court decisions that culminated with Citizens United in 2010, and thus reduce the political power of billionaires, giant corporations and their lobbyists. We need to get money out of politics, and return politics to the people through public funding of elections.

The starting point to back down oligarchy now, in this era, is found in the House of Representatives’ first proposed legislation, HR1, also known as the “For the The People Act.” Tragically, because this legislation doesn’t involve budget issues, it’s subject to a Republican filibuster, forcing a required 60 votes in the Senate to pass.

That’s why Americans must reach out to lobbyist-aligned Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, demanding they help the rest of the Democratic Party end the filibuster now or at least transform it into a “Jimmy Stewart Filibuster.” (The phone number for the Senate is 202–224–3121.)

If we don’t reclaim democracy now, the next generation of Americans may well grow up in the dystopia George Orwell imagined in his novel 1984 and Europe suffered under in the 1930s. And more and more average people who rise up to try to save our environment and country, people like Jessica Reznicek, will be thrown into prison while more and more Sackler-type billionaires will get away with more and more crimes.

Between great wealth, control of the media, police-state tactics and social media’s algorithmic radicalization of the American mind, tyranny is itching to take over completely. We must stop them before it is altogether too late.