#gopinbedwithrich — Public Fediverse posts

Part 3
The GOP, as the tool of the wealthiest, has decimated education and the middle class, gutted regulations and civil rights, undermined democracy and packed the courts with partisans who ignore their oaths of office, all in order to gain more power and be ever more wealthy.

Their "Reaganism" sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution: It’s time to say out loud that it hasn’t worked

Dear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work https://hartmannreport.com/p/dear-republicans-we-tried-your-way

#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#NeoliberalismIsAboutGreed
#CorporateGreed
#ReaganKilledMiddleClass
#GreedKills

"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."""

Part 2
The GOP, as the tool of the wealthiest, has decimated education and the middle class, gutted regulations and civil rights, undermined democracy and packed the courts with partisans who ignore their oaths of office, all in order to gain more power and be ever more wealthy.

Their "Reaganism" sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution: It’s time to say out loud that it hasn’t worked

Dear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work https://hartmannreport.com/p/dear-republicans-we-tried-your-way

#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#NeoliberalismIsAboutGreed
#CorporateGreed
#ReaganKilledMiddleClass
#GreedKills

"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, since 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."

Part 1
The GOP, as the tool of the wealthiest, has decimated education and the middle class, gutted regulations and civil rights, undermined democracy and packed the courts with partisans who ignore their oaths of office, all in order to gain more power and be ever more wealthy.

Their "Reaganism" sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution: It’s time to say out loud that it hasn’t worked

Dear Republicans: We Tried Your Way and It Does Not Work https://hartmannreport.com/p/dear-republicans-we-tried-your-way

#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#NeoliberalismIsAboutGreed
#CorporateGreed
#ReaganKilledMiddleClass
#GreedKills

"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 than at 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. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980."

Kevin McCarthy Will Take Us Back to the 1920s. Is That Good? https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a42419121/kevin-mccarthy-french-hill-house/

#WantTheirSerfsBack
#NeoLiberalism
#GOPInBedWithRich

"...Making the case for McCarthy, Hill drew on the history of Republican political economics, and what he said probably had the history department at Vanderbilt University, his alma mater, falling into what my mother used to call "HIGH-sterics." He decided to enlighten his colleagues with the story of the last time Republican infighting screwed up the election of a speaker (his comments begin at about the 6:25 mark).
...
OK so far: The election of Frederick Gillett was held up for nine ballots because of intra-party feuding dating back to a split between Roosevelt and Taft supporters from 11 years earlier. But then we move into the realms of Republican mythology from a dusty volume I never expected to hear quoted again.

When Fred Gillett was elected speaker on the ninth ballot in 1923, [he had a] more unified Republican conference, one that would go to work with President Calvin Coolidge, cut government spending, balance the budget, and cut taxes while paying down the debt. House Republicans 100 years ago unleashed a pro-growth agenda. House Republicans under Speaker Kevin McCarthy will unleash a pro-growth agenda to get this economy moving. That pro-growth agenda benefited families in the ‘20s. The McCarthy pro-growth agenda will benefit families across this country today. A century later, under Speaker Kevin McCarthy—mark my words—this party will come together to unleash American energy, make the Trump tax cuts permanent, rein run-away government spending and fight for a balanced budget. I stand before you today with unqualified support to nominate my friend, the next speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy.
I admire loyalty, I truly do. But making a case for McCarthy by saying that he would return the country to the economic policies that led directly to the Great Depression is like hearing a Democrat make the case for Hakeem Jeffries through the politics of Stephen A. Douglas. And calling Coolidge's policies "pro-growth" and a benefit to "families"— unless you mean the Astors and the Rockefellers—is flatly bizarre.
...
Between the two of them, the country got a preview of what would happen in the years after 1980, when the Republicans succumbed to the voodoo of supply-side economics. Coolidge's tax cuts increased wealth inequality and provided easy credit that was a landmine under millions of personal economies. Farmers suffered tremendously, and when the first tremors of the economic earthquake began to be felt, he fell back on his stiff-necked New England morality. He vetoed several farm relief bills and even shut down an early version of what would become the Tennessee Valley Authority. As Walter Lippman famously said of him, Coolidge's real political skill was his ability to do nothing:
...
Mr. Coolidge’s inactivity is not merely the absence of activity. It is on the contrary a steady application to the task of neutralizing and thwarting political activity wherever there are signs of life.
Which brings us back to French Hill, who brought Silent Cal back into the discussion Thursday afternoon with his promise that McCarthy would bring back the Roaring Twenties. (No, I don't want to think about Lauren Boebert as a flapper.) The Republicans—and more than a few nervous Democrats—followed Reagan into the past of laissez-faire and they've never really returned. Which has resulted in the boom-and-bust economic cycle of the past 30 years and in the establishment of fraud as the basic business plan for American corporations, just as it was in the 1920s.

In the aftermath of this (in the pages of this very magazine!), Ernest Hemingway threw an elbow at F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1936 story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”:

The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
The rich can also buy better politicians."

Up is down, black is white. These GOP nutjobs are aggressively disinforming voters to enable their attempts to destroy our democracy and our government that works for and protects Americans.

What the heck does ‘weaponizing the federal government’ even mean?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/05/republicans-weaponization-government-jordan-roy/

#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPOligarchPuppets

"Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in his failed attempt to help House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) secure the speakership on Tuesday, hollered that the government “has been weaponized against ‘we the people,’ the very people we represent.” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) later insisted that he wants his party’s leadership to stop the “swamp” in D.C. from “running over” and “stepping” on average Americans.

What the heck are they talking about?

Unsurprisingly, Republicans rarely explain just how they think the federal government is tormenting people. The overwhelming number of Americans, for example, don’t think it’s tyrannical for the government to secure $35 per month insulin for seniors, give them green energy credits or expand access to health care to veterans exposed to burn pits during war.

Perhaps Republicans are referring to the mythical 87,000 new IRS agents who they claim are about to knock down the doors of ordinary taxpayers. But as the New York Times explained, “The 87,000 figure refers to a May 2021 estimate from the Treasury Department of the total number of employees — not just auditors — the I.R.S. proposes to hire over the next 10 years with funding requested by Mr. Biden. And while the I.R.S. plans to conduct more audits, wealthy Americans and businesses will bear the brunt of that scrutiny, not, as Republicans have suggested, working families.”

If “weaponizing” government amounts to forcing rich Americans to pay taxes owed under existing law, then Republicans should come out and say that.

Then again, maybe Republicans object to prosecuting Jan. 6 insurrectionists who attacked and injured police officers, destroyed public property, and attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power. In the eyes of a number of MAGA types, the insurrectionists are the innocent victims, while the police, FBI and National Guard are the enemies.

So much for “back the blue.” As Aquilino Gonell, one of the Capitol Police officers injured while defending members of Congress, wrote in an op-ed for the Times condemning former president Donald Trump for his role in the insurrection, “Even more galling are the Republicans who still refuse to provide testimony under oath and instead dangerously downplay how close we came to losing our democracy.” In fact, 21 House Republicans voted against giving Congressional Gold Medals to the heroic police.

Maybe Republican are still harping on the federal government’s efforts to prevent Americans from dying of covid-19. Requirements for masks, vaccines, social distancing — the horror!

MAGA extremists seem to have sympathy for the Republican governors who resisted lifesaving measures, resulting in disproportionate deaths in red locales. As Scientific American found, “Republican-leaning ‘red’ states were much more resistant to health measures. The consequences of those differences emerged by the end of 2020, when rates of hospitalization and death from COVID rose in conservative counties and dropped in liberal ones.” (Oddly, these same Republicans favor using the government to force women to remain pregnant and give birth, a practice straight from Communist China’s playbook.)

Indeed, right-wing authoritarians seem to be engaged in a giant exercise in projection. You want examples of abusive government? Take a look at red-state governors who seek to use the power of the state to target LGBTQ youths, deny the right of assembly, silence dissent and suppress voting rights.

So if you are confused about what in the world Jordan, Roy and the other MAGA radicals are hollering about, you are not alone. Their party of nihilists insists that legitimate functions of government amount to tyranny, while their own abuse of power represents the will of “real Americans.” Whether they believe this nonsense is irrelevant; what we know is that the same delusional thinking that triggered the 2021 coup attempt is alive and well, fanned by right-wing hucksters who can dupe Americans into sending a few more bucks to fight “socialists” — or something."

Part 3
While the battle for House Speaker appears to be about personality, it’s really about ideology. It’s about the future of “big government” and the American middle class

The Real Reason the Freedom Caucus Hates Kevin McCarthy Is Larger Than You Think https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-real-reason-the-freedom-caucus?

#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithRich

"The world is made up of “makers” and “takers,” they’ll tell you. The billionaire “job creators” shouldn’t be taxed to support the “moochers” who demand everything from union rights to a living wage to free college.

Why, these Freedom Caucus members ask, should their billionaire patrons be forced — at the barrel of an IRS agent’s gun! — to pay taxes to support the ungrateful masses through “big government” programs? Isn’t it up to each of us to make our own fortunes? Wasn’t Darwin right?

These Republicans believe our government should really only have a few simple mandates: maintain a strong military, tough cops, and a court system to protect their economic empires.

That’s why they’ll support massive prison expansions and nosebleed levels of pentagon spending but (metaphorically) fight to the death to prevent an expansion of Social Security or food stamps.

And that’s why they hate Kevin McCarthy.

In the past, McCarthy has shown a willingness to compromise and negotiate with Democrats. Most recently, as Congressman Chip Roy pointed out on the House floor yesterday when nominating Byron Donalds to replace McCarthy, he failed to block the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill through Congress that was loaded with what rightwing billionaires consider “freebies” for “taker” and “moocher” Americans.

It appears all or nearly all of the Freedom Caucus members, dancing to the tune first played by David Koch, don’t believe in our current form of American government. They want us to go back to the pre-1930s America, before FDR’s New Deal.

Those were the halcyon days when workers cowered before their employers, women and minorities knew their places, and government didn’t interfere with the business of dynasty-building even when it meant poisoning entire communities and crushing small businesses.

They appear to agree with the majority of the Supreme Court Republicans who recently began dismantling the “big government” administrative state by ending the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gasses.

They’ve already succeeded, over the past 40 years of the Reagan Revolution, at whittling the middle class down from 65 percent of us to around 45 percent of us: NPR commemorated it in 2015 with the headline: “The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class.”

Now they want even more poverty for workers and more riches for their morbidly rich funders, and don’t believe that “moderate” Republicans will get them there. As Ginni Thomas and a pantheon of “conservative” luminaries wrote yesterday in an open letter opposing McCarthy’s speakership:

“[H]e has failed to answer for, or commit to halting, his coordinated efforts in the 2022 elections to promote moderate Republican candidates over conservatives.”

The “conservative” Republicans have already announced that once they get their act together in Congress with a new speaker, their first order of business is going to be to cut more taxes on billionaires.

While the battle for House Speaker appears to be about personality, it’s really about ideology and policy. It’s about the future of “big government” and whether or not we will continue to have an American middle class.

And as long as Libertarian-leaning billionaires continue pouring cash into the campaigns and lifestyles of Republican members of Congress, this battle that’s been going on for over 40 years to tear apart the American middle-class is not going to end or go away any day soon."

Part 2
While the battle for House Speaker appears to be about personality, it’s really about ideology. It’s about the future of “big government” and the American middle class

The Real Reason the Freedom Caucus Hates Kevin McCarthy Is Larger Than You Think https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-real-reason-the-freedom-caucus?

#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithRich

"In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president with the Libertarian Party, an organization created by the real estate lobby to give an air of legitimacy to their efforts to outlaw rent control and end government regulation of their industry.

His platform included a whole series of positions that were specifically designed to roll back and gut FDR’s “big government” programs (along with those added on by both Nixon and LBJ’s Great Society) that had created and then sustained America’s 20th century middle class:

— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.
— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.
— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.
— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.
— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.
— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.
— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.
— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.
— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.
— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.
— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.
— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.
— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”

Today’s challenges to Kevin McCarthy are mostly coming from members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus, pretty much a reinvention of the Tea Party Caucus, funded in substantial part by rightwing billionaires and CEOs who share the late David Koch’s worldview."

Part 1
While the battle for House Speaker appears to be about personality, it’s really about ideology. It’s about the future of “big government” and the American middle class

The Real Reason the Freedom Caucus Hates Kevin McCarthy Is Larger Than You Think https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-real-reason-the-freedom-caucus?

#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithRich

"While Kevin McCarthy’s struggle to become Speaker of the House of Representatives appears to be about personality and struggles within the House Republican caucus, it’s really about something much larger: the fate and future of American “big government” and the middle class it created.

Ever since the Reagan Revolution, the phrase “big government” has been on the lips of Republican politicians. They utter it like a curse at every opportunity.

It seems paradoxical: Republicans complain about “big government,” but then go on to support more and more government money for expanding prisons and a bloated Pentagon budget. Once you understand their worldview, however, it all makes perfect sense.

First, some background.

From the founding of our republic through the early 1930s the American middle class was relatively small. It was almost entirely made up of the professional and mercantile class: doctors, lawyers, shop-owners and the like. Only a tiny percentage of Americans were what we would today call middle class.

Factory workers, farmers, carpenters, plumbers, and pretty much all manner of “unskilled laborers” were the working poor rather than the middle class. Most neighborhoods across America had a quality of life even lower than what today we would call “ghettos.”

As recently as 1900, for example, women couldn’t vote, senators were appointed by the wealthiest power brokers in the states, and poverty stalked America.

There was no minimum wage; when workers tried to organize unions, police would help employers beat or even murder their ringleaders; and social safety net programs like unemployment insurance, Social Security, public schools, Medicare, food and housing supports, and Medicaid didn’t exist.

There was no income tax to pay for such programs, and federal receipts were a mere 3 percent of GDP (today its around 20 percent). As the President’s Council of Economic Advisors noted in their 2000 Annual Report:

“To appreciate how far we have come, it is instructive to look back on what American life was like in 1900. At the turn of the century, fewer than 10 percent of homes had electricity, and fewer than 2 percent of people had telephones. An automobile was a luxury that only the very wealthy could afford.

“Many women still sewed their own clothes and gave birth at home. Because chlorination had not yet been introduced and water filtration was rare, typhoid fever, spread by contaminated water, was a common affliction. One in 10 children died in infancy. Average life expectancy in the United States was a mere 47 years.

“Fewer than 14 percent of Americans graduated from high school. ... Widowhood was far more common than divorce. The average household had close to five members, and a fifth of all households had seven or more. …

“Average income per capita, in 1999 dollars, was about $4,200. … The typical workweek in manufacturing was about 50 hours, 20 percent longer than the average today.”

The Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, though, was a huge wake-up call for American voters, answered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

His New Deal programs brought us, for the first time, “big government” and the people loved it. They elected him President of the United States four times!

FDR created Social Security, unemployment insurance, guaranteed the right to unionize, outlawed child labor, regulated big business by creating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other agencies, and funded infrastructure across the country from roads to bridges to dams and power stations.

He raised taxes on the morbidly rich all the way up to 90% and used that money to build schools and hospitals across the nation. He brought electricity to rural parts of the country, and put literally millions to work in various “big government” programs.

“Big government,” in other words, created the modern American middle-class.

By the 1950s a strong middle class representing almost half of Americans had emerged for the first time in American history.

By the late 1970s it was around 65 percent of us.

And that’s when the billionaires (then merely multimillionaires) decided enough was enough and got to work."

The treasonous members of the Freedom Caucus are puppets of the Koch's and Peter Theil, among other oligarchs, who want to neuter the government so they face no regulations and have total power, control and even more money.

"With Trump running for President and the Freedom Caucus running the House"

How not to mark the 2nd anniversary of the day American democracy almost died https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-not-to-mark-the-2nd-anniversary

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#FreedomCaucusTreason
#GOPTreason
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPOligarchPuppets
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"Two years ago today the United States Capitol was attacked by a mob determined to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden as President.

Members of Congress most involved in that insurrection — those subpoenaed by the January 6 committee yet who ignored the subpoenas (Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama), and others who have been linked to the insurrection (Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, and Louie Gohmert of Texas) — are members of the far-right Freedom Caucus.

They are on the verge of hijacking the Speakership, which means hijacking the House, hijacking Congress, and hijacking the American people.

In their pending deal with Kevin McCarthy, they will have the power to recall him at any time if he doesn’t hew to their demands. They’ll also get approval power over some plum committee assignments, including a third of the members on the influential Rules Committee, which controls what legislation reaches the floor and in what form. And spending bills would have to be considered under so-called open rules, allowing any member to put to a vote an unlimited number of changes that could gut or scuttle the legislation altogether.

Two years have passed, yet the top lawmakers in the US government who were most directly involved in the insurrection — Trump and his co-conspirators in Congress — have not been held accountable.

To the contrary, Trump is so far unopposed in seeking the Republican nomination for President, and his co-conspirators are wielding more influence over the U.S. government than ever before.

This is not the way to mark the second anniversary of the day American democracy almost died."

Part 2
There is something very disturbing about these freedom caucus members' support for Putin, attempts to destroy democracy, social security and whole agencies and their funding by Peter Theil and Koch.

"Is this all a continuation of Trump’s January 6th coup attempt and his desire to convert America from a democracy into a despotic strongman-rule nation aligned with Russia?"

Is the Anti-McCarthy Crowd in the Bag for the Billionaires, Putin, or Both? https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-the-anti-mccarthy-crowd-in-the

#GOPTreason
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithRich
#PutinHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithPutin
#GOPOligarchPuppets
#WantTheirSerfsBack

“It's becoming clear now: This is January 6th, Episode II. The Freedom Caucus is demanding debt default, which will spark a ~$15T global financial crisis. COVID was ~$4T. This will only help Putin and his BRICS+/GGC allies.”

Skeptical but curious, I plugged the names of each of the 20 Republicans who voted against McCarthy in the first vote yesterday into a search engine along with the word “Russia.” Here’s what I found about 15 of them:

Andy Biggs voted against legislation to document Russian war crimes in Ukraine, as did Paul Gosar and Scott Perry.

Matt Gaetz, Dan Bishop, Paul Gosar, Ralph Norman, and Scott Perry all voted against suspending normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus.

Dan Bishop, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, and Chip Roy all voted against a bill to ban imports of Russian oil and gas.

Those four also voted against legislation to strip Russia from “most favored nation status” by the World Trade Organization.

Paul Gosar and Matt Rosendale both voted against a resolution that reaffirmed US support for Ukrainian sovereignty.

John Brecheen is new to Congress, but when asked by his local newspaper about whether America should support Ukraine against the Russian invasion he replied, “My position is I would not have voted for funding of war.”

Michael Cloud tweeted: “The Biden Admin has ignored a year-long invasion at our southern border but is considering risking the lives of U.S. soldiers to protect Ukraine's border? Ukraine is thousands of miles away.”

Voting against Sweden and Finland joining NATO, a pet Putin peeve, were Michael Cloud, Andy Biggs, Dan Bishop, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Bob Good, Ralph Norman, and Chip Roy.

Eli Crane says of the US supporting Ukraine, “This is a war we shouldn’t be involved in,” and it will make the Afghanistan exit “look like child’s play.”

Matt Gaetz tweeted: “Today the House didn't organize. Biggest loser: Zelensky. Biggest winner: U.S. Taxpayers.” He also tweeted: “I’m more concerned with the US-Mexico border than the Russia-Ukraine border. Not sorry.”

Opposing US aid to Ukraine, Matt Gaetz told a CPAC audience: “Why should Americans have to pay the costs for freedom elsewhere when our own leaders won't stand up for our freedom here?”

Paul Gosar tweeted: “Ukraine is not our ally. Russia is not our enemy. We need to address our crippling debt, inflation and immigration problems. None of this is Putin's fault.”

Paul Gosar wrote an open letter to the White House asking President Biden to “refrain from participating in its annually recurring nuclear exercise ‘Steadfast Noon’ in conjunction with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to ‘prevent further escalation.’”

Paul Gosar tweeted: “Putin puts Russia first as he should.”

Mary Miller, Bob Good, Ralph Norman, Andy Biggs, and Matt Gaetz co-sponsored legislation to forbid any further delivery of military equipment to Ukraine.
...
Ralph Norman, who called for Trump to impose “Marshall law” to prevent Biden from being sworn in, first issued a statement on day one of the invasion of Ukraine condemning Russia but then voted “No” on US aid to Ukraine in September and continues to oppose such aid.
...
Matt Rosendale issued a statement saying: “The United States has no legal or moral obligation to come to the aid of either side in this foreign conflict.” He voted against a resolution “supporting the people of Ukraine.” He also introduced legislation blocking any US aid to Ukraine.

Byron Donalds voted against US aid to Ukraine.
...
While none of this proves that the anti-McCarthy forces are getting their marching orders from Putin, it does raise some significant questions about their commitment to the continuation of the current form and nature of our government. I think Dave Troy’s idea is worth taking seriously.

Because the outcome he contemplates is something both the rightwing billionaires and Putin could get behind."

Part 1
There is something very disturbing about these freedom caucus members' support for Putin, attempts to destroy democracy, social security and whole agencies and their funding by Peter Theil and Koch.

"Is this all a continuation of Trump’s January 6th coup attempt and his desire to convert America from a democracy into a despotic strongman-rule nation aligned with Russia?"

Is the Anti-McCarthy Crowd in the Bag for the Billionaires, Putin, or Both? https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-the-anti-mccarthy-crowd-in-the

#GOPTreason
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithRich
#PutinHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithPutin
#GOPOligarchPuppets
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"Amazingly, it’s the second anniversary of January 6th and we’re still talking about an ongoing attempt to sabotage the American government.

Yesterday, I argued that the Freedom Caucus members and their handful of compatriots voting against Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House may have been doing so because the rightwing billionaires who back them want to roll back FDR’s “big government” in America.

Now comes investigative journalist Dave Troy noting that America’s rightwing billionaires aren’t the only ones who want the US government to fail. So does Vladimir Putin.

And most of those voting against McCarthy not only appear to be in the bag for the billionaires but for Putin as well.
...
“Putin and others in his milieu well-remember what Russia defaulting on its debt was like in 1998. Now it seems they feel like it's payback time, as many of them feel that default was something engineered by the US between 1989-1998.”

There’s absolutely no doubt that a default by the United States would cripple our economy and lead to a crisis not seen since the Republican Great Depression.

CBS News reports that Moody’s Analytics’ Chief Economist Mark Zandi says it would nearly instantly wipe out as many as 6 million jobs and destroy $15 trillion in household wealth. Unemployment would rapidly spike to at least 9 percent and the stock market would fall by a third.

But is it possible that’s actually the goal of the anti-McCarthy crowd? And, if so, why or on whose behalf?
...
Back in 2011, the last time Republicans played chicken with our national debt by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, our nation’s credit was downgraded, leading to higher borrowing costs and economic weakness that continued into the 2012 election year, badly (but not fatally) damaging Democrats and Obama’s re-election chances.

Had Republicans not blinked at the last minute and given in to lifting the debt ceiling so the Treasury could pay bills run up by Congress years before, we would have defaulted and the shattering consequences would still be felt today. It’s hard to overstate how much damage it would have done to America, American businesses, and American families.

But are the Republicans fighting against McCarthy really planning a repeat of blocking the debt ceiling only, this time, actually destroying our nation’s creditworthiness? Could they be that psychopathic?

And, if so, are they doing it because their billionaire sponsors think we should shut down most government agencies that support the middle class and the poor, or because Putin is supporting such an effort?

Or both?

Ryan Grim reported Wednesday in The Intercept that when insurrectionist Congressman Ralph Norman was asked if he and his colleagues actually intended to force McCarthy (or any other Speaker) to “shut down the government rather than raise the debt ceiling,” Norman replied:

“That’s a non-negotiable item.”

When asked if he was talking about shutting down the government or actually defaulting on the debt, Norman said:

“That’s why you need to be planning now what agencies — what path you’re gonna take now to trim government. Tell the programs you’re going to get to this number. And you do that before chairs are picked.”

Norman was explaining that if Biden and Congress don’t agree to kill off the federal agencies he and his buddies don’t like — HHS? FBI? EPA? SEC? FEC? — they will destroy America’s full faith and credit in the eyes of the world this summer when we hit the debt ceiling.

Troy argues this is all a continuation of Trump’s January 6th coup attempt and his desire to convert America from a democracy and ally of democracies around the world into a despotic strongman-rule nation aligned with Putin’s Russia:"

Part 3
The greedy people who care only about money and possessions are destroying our country!!

What motivates Republicans to say they’re for the “little guy” when the only policies they'll pursue are to cut taxes for the rich, gut unions, destroy public schools & ship jobs overseas?

Why Must Americans Walk Life's Tightrope Without a Safety Net?
https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-must-americans-walk-lifes-tightrope?

#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPGreedy
#GreedKills

"It’s not about immigrants taking jobs from working-class Americans.

After “reforming” our immigration laws in 1986, Ronald Reagan stopped enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring people who are here without documentation (even though those employers were — and are — committing a crime by hiring undocumented workers).

As a result, entire industries like construction and meatpacking that once provided good union jobs have been de-unionized, their former American-citizen union employees replaced by low-wage workers without documentation.

And when the spotlight gets shined on those industries, Republicans are more than happy to put poor, hard-working Brown people in jail, but there’s no way they’re ever going to go after wealthy white employers. The Trump administration, for example, kicked off the midterm election year of 2018 by raiding over ninety 7-Eleven stores, hauling off undocumented Hispanic people for the cameras they invited to the arrests. Not a single employer went to jail, although they were the ones who initiated the “crime.”

Republican politicians don’t give a damn about your job, particularly when they can find somebody else to do it cheaper, although they do have to put on a little show from time to time to keep the racists happy.

It’s not about putting America or Americans “first.”

Reagan and Bush the Elder negotiated NAFTA and revived the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) so businesses could offshore entire factories. Since the Reagan administration instituted neoliberalism in 1981, over 60,000 factories have left America, taking along with them at least 15 million jobs.

Donald Trump‘s rewrite of NAFTA even gave American companies a huge new tax break if they’d move their factories from America to Mexico.

At the end of the day, all Republican politicians care about is money. Greed is their principle animating force, and what binds them to their morbidly rich donors.

The greed embraced by Republican politicians — and the billionaires and CEOs who fund them — is why average Americans can’t have nice things. It’s why we and our children must walk the tightrope of life without the same safety net other countries — from Canada to Costa Rica, France to Taiwan — offer their citizens.

It doesn’t matter to Republican politicians how many Americans die unnecessarily, how many of our fellow citizens struggle in misery and poverty, how many children’s growth is stunted or bodies and brains are poisoned by industrial and mining waste being poured into our air and rivers.

As long as the money keeps rolling in and the GOP’s billionaire patrons keep paying less than 3 percent in income taxes, greed is all Republican politicians care about or are willing to fight for."

Part 2
The greedy people who care only about money and possessions are destroying our country!!

What motivates Republicans to say they’re for the “little guy” when the only policies they'll pursue are to cut taxes for the rich, gut unions, destroy public schools & ship jobs overseas?

Why Must Americans Walk Life's Tightrope Without a Safety Net?
https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-must-americans-walk-lifes-tightrope?publication_id=302288&post_id=94123524&isFreemail=true

#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPGreedy
#GreedKills

"It’s not about charity.

Republicans say that the housing, healthcare, and other needs of poor people should be taken care of through “private philanthropy” instead of government. What they’re really saying is that they don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to maintain a healthy society.

By cutting government support for poor and working-class people, as Anand Giridharadas documents so well, those very average Americans will become more dependent on the noble philanthropists among the billionaire class and less bonded to their own nation’s government.

It’s not about Christianity, although they’re constantly invoking Jesus for everything from pushing the death penalty on women who want to get an abortion to giving bigots the legal right to discriminate against gay, lesbian, and trans people.

Jesus never once mentioned abortion and decried bigotry, but they regularly ignore and even flout His teachings in the Sermon on the Mount and His warnings in Matthew 25. They protect multimillionaire evangelists’ tax-free status, and the preachers repay them by preaching politics from the pulpit.

It’s not about saving Americans from the pandemic or concern for public health.

Trump used the Defense Production Act, for example, to force mostly Brown and Black meatpackers back to work, not to keep Americans safe. As long as the factories are humming and the stock market is rising, a few hundred thousand dead Americans are just collateral damage.

It’s not about conservatism.

They’re not interested in slowly or “cautiously” improving society, or “conserving” anything other than the balances in their own checking accounts. They like to use the word “conservative,” but they’ve rendered it meaningless at best and code for “racist” at worst.

It’s not about making the world a better place.

Republican politicians deny climate change, deregulate industries that poison our air and water, and do everything they can to screw working people out of unions, good wages, and decent benefits. They’re totally down with pesticides that are killing our pollinators while they poison our atmosphere with their carbon emissions, all just to make a buck.

It’s not about having a better-educated electorate or populace.

They’ve spent decades trying to destroy our public education system that was, in the 1960s, the envy of the world. When they did away with free and low-cost college education during the Reagan years they kicked off almost $2 trillion worth of student debt which is preventing people from starting families, opening small businesses, or even buying their first house. But it sure is profitable for Republican-donor bankers!

It isn’t about “culture.”

They do a good-old-boy NASCAR/Duck Dynasty routine to bring in the rubes, but there’s no way Donald Trump would ever invite the average Republican voter with a giant flag and a pickup truck to any of his golf clubs, nor would Ted Cruz want to vacation with one of them or their families in Cancun.

It’s not about “gun violence.”

As long as their investments in weapons manufacturers are profitable and the problem of gun violence is limited to poor- and working-class Americans, Republican politicians don’t give a rat’s ass about “gun safety.” Although they’re happy to use guns as a wedge issue to bring in male voters who are insecure about their own masculinity.

It’s not about “protecting our children.”

The main through-story of the GOP attacks on queer people is that “they’re coming for your kids.” If Republican politicians actually cared about our kids, they’d do something about America being the only country in the world where gun violence is the leading cause of childhood death.

Republican politicians know that most pedophiles are straight men, but attacking defenseless minorities has been the cheap trick of craven demagogues from the eras of crusades, pogroms, and witch burnings to this day."

Part 1
The greedy people who care only about money and possessions are destroying our country!!

What motivates Republicans to say they’re for the “little guy” when the only policies they'll pursue are to cut taxes for the rich, gut unions, destroy public schools & ship jobs overseas?

Why Must Americans Walk Life's Tightrope Without a Safety Net?
https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-must-americans-walk-lifes-tightrope?publication_id=302288&post_id=94123524&isFreemail=true

#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPGreedy
#GreedKills

"Republicans are about to seize control of the US House of Representatives, where the Constitution says all taxation and spending must originate. And the result won’t be difficult to predict.

This Spring will be the 20th anniversary of my radio program. During that entire time, I’ve run a contest for anybody who can name even one single piece of legislation from the past 40 years (since Reagan) that was:
— authored by Republicans,
— principally co-sponsored by Republicans,
— passed Congress with a Republican majority,
— signed by a Republican president,
— and benefited average working people or the poor more than it did the GOP’s donor class.

Outside of a feeble-attempt bill to regulate spam callers during the first Bush administration and legislation reversing the Osage Allotment Act of 1906, nobody has ever won the autographed book prize.

Every developed country in the world has some variation on a free or low-cost national healthcare system, and free or subsidized higher education.

In most developed countries homelessness is not a crisis; nobody goes bankrupt because somebody in their family got sick; and jobs pay well enough and have union pensions so people can retire after 30 or 40 years in the workforce and live comfortably for the rest of their lives.

But not in America. Republican politicians have fought tooth-and-nail for generations to prevent any of those things from happening here.

Which raises the question: “Why?”

Why do Republican politicians promote hateful messages and cruel policies? Why are Republican-run states the real “shithole” parts of the US with the highest rates of poverty, violence, early death, disease, and illiteracy?

What motivates these Republican politicians to say they’re for the “little guy” when the only policies they pursue are to cut taxes on the rich, gut unions, destroy public schools, and ship jobs overseas?

It’s not about ideology.

Republicans don’t hate Social Security and Medicare, for example, because they’re afraid that those programs are going to somehow turn America into a “socialist” country. They hate those programs because they’re paid for with tax dollars, and greedy Republicans hate to pay their fair share of taxes.

It’s not about racism, although it often appears that way.

The reason Republicans work so hard to keep Black and Brown people down is because they subscribe to a weird economic theory that “requires” an underclass who do most of the hard work for very little money. Thus, morbidly rich Republican “donors” — being part of the overclass — can reap the benefits of increased corporate profits while keeping their taxes low so they can stuff the extra cash into their money bins.

If their use of racist language and Confederate iconography brings in a few more low-IQ white voters, that’s just icing on the cake. They can use the racist yahoos to get themselves reelected so giant corporations will continue to stuff their SuperPACs with lobbyist cash they can use for their own retirement."

Part 2
GOP base blames everyone but their puppet masters for their predicament!
From stagnant wages to soaring costs for rent, medical, and prescription drugs—the so-called "conservative" voter never seems to figure out what's going on
“The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.” Voltaire.

Will GOP Voters Ever Wake Up to How Much GOP Lawmakers Screw Them Over?| Common Dreams https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/will-gop-voters-ever-wake-up

#GOPLies
#GOPCorrupt
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPExploitsTheirBase
#GOPManipulatesTheirBase
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"You’d think the white base of the GOP would have figured out by now that the Republican elite are more interested in keeping their wages down than having them as neighbors, but the “Makers” of the party have executed a brilliant strategy to keep their own taxes low and profits high while suppressing the “Takers’” wages and benefits among the party’s base.

Truth be told, many in the GOP base were beginning to figure this out by the end of the disastrous presidency of trust-fund-baby George W. Bush.

He’d begun the privatization of Medicare with his Medicare Advantage scam in 2003; lied us into two unnecessary and illegal wars; borrowed around $4 trillion to fund a massive tax cut for his donors, family, and friends; and to top it all off was only in the White House because his brother was governor of Florida and threw 80,000 Black voters off the rolls just months before the 2000 election…and still needed his father’s friends on the Supreme Court to get him into office.

Bush Junior was also the least racist of the Republican presidents since Nixon, and put two Black people at the top of the State Department: many in the white GOP base never forgave him for Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice.

All in all, most Americans — including a substantial margin of Republican voters — were done and over with Bush and the metaphorical horse he rode in on (as much as he wanted to emulate Reagan, Bush is afraid of horses which is why his Texas election-prop “ranch” was an old pig farm).
...
Obama’s ascension to the highest office in the land was a gift to the morbidly rich funders of the GOP: a “Black liberal from Chicago” being president broke the brains of the most reliable part of the GOP base.

The billionaires leaped to the opportunity. Resurrecting a meme from the tobacco industry’s “smoker’s rights” scam of the 1990s, they rolled out the 2009 version of the Tea Party, complete with millions of dollars to pay for buses, staged events, and well-funded PR operations to get it all into the media every day.

While the foreground was “taxed enough already” and “death panels,” the background was “Black man in the White House wants to give your tax dollars to his Black friends.” It was Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” all over again, only in a far more sophisticated form.

There’s a lot of truth to the internet meme: “Republicans have gotten over Trump’s sexual assaults, affairs, idolatry, greed, profanity and vulgarity…but they’ve never gotten over Obama being Black.”

By the end of Obama’s presidency, though, the Tea Party had become a caricature of itself: old white boomers with silly “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” signs wrote their own jokes.

So, with fellow billionaire (at least he said he was) Trump in the White House, the capstone funders of the GOP changed their brand positioning.

They plastered the word “freedom” all over everything, including the caucus they bought and paid for in Congress. They helped launch hundreds of Spanish-language radio stations to spread the gospel of “free markets” and “you, too, can have white privilege” to America’s fastest growing demographic group. Their media operations made billions and aligned themselves with Russia, Hungary, and other straight-white-male-power authoritarian states.

They even continue to financially support politicians who tried to overthrow the government of the United States.

Which brings us back to the question:

“When will Republican voters wake up to their own oppression at the hands of the GOP’s billionaire funders?”
My bet is that as long as Democrats continue to welcome racial and gender minorities into their party, Republican voters will stay with their nearly-all-white politicians. Particularly people like Steve “David Duke without the baggage” Scalise and Marjorie “Jewish space lasers” Greene.

Will investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop or the FBI be enough for Republicans to re-energize their base and gain control of all of Congress and the White House by 2024?

Hold my popcorn…"

Part 1
GOP base blames everyone but their puppet masters for their predicament!
From stagnant wages to soaring costs for rent, medical, and prescription drugs—the so-called "conservative" voter never seems to figure out what's going on
“The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.” Voltaire.

Will GOP Voters Ever Wake Up to How Much GOP Lawmakers Screw Them Over? | Common Dreams https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/will-gop-voters-ever-wake-up

#GOPLies
#GOPCorrupt
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPExploitsTheirBase
#GOPManipulatesTheirBase
#WantTheirSerfsBack

When will Republican voters figure out how badly they’re getting screwed by Republican politicians?

— Desperate workers struggle with soaring rents (courtesy of Republican-donor hedge funds);
— lack of healthcare (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to expand Medicaid for under-$15,000/year workers) is literally killing Americans;
— wages have flatlined since Reagan declared war on workers in 1981 while the merely rich have become the morbidly rich;
— Americans pay 10 times as much as Canadians for some drugs because Republicans block any effort to bring competition to that marketplace;
— at the same time Trump and his GOP buddies in the House and Senate borrowed $1.7 trillion to fund a tax giveaway to his billionaire buddies, student debt passed the $1.7 trillion mark…

Yet somehow the “conservative” base voters never seem to figure it out. Why?

Most Republican voters don’t think much about it, but there are two very distinct layers to the GOP. It’s like a pyramid with a capstone at the very top.

The vast base of the pyramid are the white voters who Richard Nixon invited into the party after the Democrats embraced racial equality in 1964/1965 with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

They mostly live in all-white neighborhoods, attend all-white churches, and send their kids to all-white schools. While most aren’t the Confederate-flag-toting “out and open” racists like the folks who showed up at the Capitol on January 6th, they’re nonetheless “uncomfortable” with nonwhite people. It’s their “culture,” they’ll tell you.

At the tippy-top of the pyramid, it’s capstone, are the handful of white billionaires who answered Lewis Powell’s 1971 call to get active and seize control of America’s political institutions.

They’ve funded think tanks in every state and at the federal level, sponsor anti-labor economics and political science professors in our colleges and universities, lever judges into positions all the way up to the Supreme Court, and pour a seemingly unending river of cash into Republican candidates for office.

These elite of the GOP live insular lives in their mansions with servants’ quarters and private security, travel on private jets, and vacation on private islands or their own personal super-yachts. They don’t really care that much about race because it’s not an issue in their daily lives: the people who enter the circle around them and their families are tightly regulated.

These conservative elite often own or are descended from the owners of America’s largest and most profitable businesses. Their issues, therefore, are their own income taxes and the regulation of their companies’ behavior.

They understand that Voltaire was dead serious when he said, “The comfort of the rich depends on an abundant supply of the poor.”

To keep their taxes low they fund movements to privatize public schools, gut “entitlements,” and oppose any sort of “welfare” aid to working class or poor people. To keep their businesses “free of government interference” they pay off politicians and hire judges to destroy unions, kneecap regulations, and spiff “conservative” media celebrities who lionized them as “job creators” and “geniuses.”

The wealthy and corporations want to control the country and have no use for democracy. They only want power and money. They see people as a means to getting money and power, not as equals. They want their serfs back!

The memo that broke American politics by Robert Reich
https://www.rawstory.com/lewis-powell/

#GreedKills
#GOPInBedWithRich
#GOPCorporateShills
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#MoneyIsNotSpeech
#CorporationsRNotPeople
#LewisPowellSucks
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, a corporate attorney who would go on to become a Supreme Court justice, to draft a memo on the state of the country.

Powell’s memo argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups.

In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of the Second World War. They wanted to ensure corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders — workers, consumers, and the environment — not just their shareholders.

But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. In his memo, Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat, and stressed that the critical ingredients for success were joint organizing and funding.

The Chamber distributed the memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations — hoping to persuade them that Big Business could dominate American politics in ways not seen since the Gilded Age.

It worked.

The Chamber’s call for a business crusade birthed a new corporate-political industry practically overnight. Tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists and political operatives descended on Washington and state capitals across the country.

I should know — I saw it happen with my own eyes.

In 1976, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers.

Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when we began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the agency altogether, shutting it down for weeks.

I was dumbfounded. What had happened?

In three words, The Powell Memo.

Lobbyists and their allies in Congress, and eventually the Reagan administration, worked to defang agencies like the FTC — and to staff them with officials who would overlook corporate misbehavior.

Their influence led the FTC to stop seriously enforcing antitrust laws — among other things — allowing massive corporations to merge and concentrate their power even further.
...
Meanwhile, Justice Lewis Powell used the Court to chip away at restrictions on corporate power in politics. His opinions in the 1970s and 80s laid the foundation for corporations to claim free speech rights in the form of financial contributions to political campaigns.

Put another way — without Lewis Powell, there would probably be no Citizens United — the case that threw out limits on corporate campaign spending as a violation of the “free speech” of corporations.

These actions have transformed our political system. Corporate money supports platoons of lawyers, often outgunning any state or federal attorneys who dare to stand in their way. Lobbying has become a $3.7 billion dollar industry.

Corporations regularly outspend labor unions and public interest groups during election years. And too many politicians in Washington represent the interests of corporations — not their constituents. As a result, corporate taxes have been cut, loopholes widened, and regulations gutted.

Corporate consolidation has also given companies unprecedented market power, allowing them to raise prices on everything from baby formula to gasoline. Their profits have jumped into the stratosphere — the highest in 70 years.

But despite the success of the Powell Memo, Big Business has not yet won. The people are beginning to fight back.

First, antitrust is making a comeback. Both at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department we’re seeing a new willingness to take on corporate power.

Second, working people are standing up. Across the country workers are unionizing at a faster rate than we’ve seen in decades — including at some of the biggest corporations in the world — and they’re winning.

Third, campaign finance reform is within reach. Millions of Americans are intent on limiting corporate money in politics – and politicians are starting to listen.

All of these tell me that now is our best opportunity in decades to take on corporate power — at the ballot box, in the workplace, and in Washington.

Let’s get it done."

The GOP, the puppet of the wealthy, wants to shrink government so that it can no longer regulate, tax and stand up to corporate and wealthy interests. This way, the wealthy can do what they want with us and get their serfs back!!

Reagan and the GOP's Anti-Government Master Plan https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/22/2143292/-Reagan-and-the-GOP-s-Anti-Government-Master-Plan

#GOPInBedWithRich
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"Back to the letter, the writer notes that the very government Reagan criticized was the entity that was able to come up with this historic discovery. That got me thinking about the GOP’s long-time calls for “smaller government,” “limited government,” and whatever else they label it.

It sounds good, until you realize it’s all a con. Republicans – who have increased our national debt with as much if not more gusto as the Democrats – don’t care about the size of government. They see a “smaller government” as one that does less, costs less, and requires less taxes to pay for.

That’s the goal: tax cuts, particularly ones that will favor their big individual and corporate donors. They know their cut of their benefactors’ resulting gains will more often than not be funneled through super PACs and dark-money groups to help them win elections. And who knows where else it will go.

That’s the “small government” lie.

And where will the cuts be made to reach this goal? I don’t recall anyone interviewing a Republican talking about “small government” asking the follow-ups “What does this look like? What would you cut? What would you eliminate?”

We all know what they’d eliminate if they had the chance: programs that help people. Cuts to the social safety net. Cuts to or the privatization of Medicare and Social Security. Programs that Republicans generally hate because they cost a lot of money and help people they generally don’t like and who aren’t sending them big campaign contributions.

By the way, what resulted from Reagan’s calls for a “smaller government?” Well, in 2014 Mother Jones reported that “Reagan actually expanded the federal government.”

Under Reagan, the national debt almost tripled – from $907 billion in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988, and the federal workforce increased by about 324,000 to almost 5.3 million people, the article reported.

You can read the Mother Jones story here.

So, we ballooned our debt and hired hundreds of thousands more people while the man who championed “small government” was going about doing what he really wanted to do: cut taxes.

And that didn’t work out, either.

A Bloomberg opinion piece by Justin Fox published in 2017 was titled, “The Mostly Forgotten Tax Increases of 1982-1993.” It carried the subhead “Something had to make up for the financial hole created by Reagan’s famous cuts.”

The column began like this:

“The Economic Recovery Act of 1981, also known as the Reagan tax cuts, was the biggest reduction in U.S. taxes of the past 70 years, possibly even the biggest ever. That much is reasonably well-known.

“What is less well-known is that these cuts were then followed by a series of tax increases that, if you add them all together, were almost as big as or even bigger than the 1981 cuts, depending on the measure you use.”

You can read Fox’s column here.

Reagan’s “small government” bullshit was a lie. A con on behalf of himself and his rich friends. That con continues today by the Right.

Look, this isn’t a glorification of how government operates. It needs to better, smarter, and more efficient. Its biggest problem might be that its ultimate boss is a dysfunctional Congress full of men and women whose main agenda is helping themselves, their donors, and their friends instead of helping the people who elected them to office.

Plus, some of them are just plain dumb.

That’s something we can’t afford to be. “Small government” is just another GOP weapon in tis pro-rich, anti-poor-and-middle-class agenda. It’s just another cliché that needs to be dissected by a press that too often seems to rely on scripted questions instead of actually listening to an answer and thinking up immediate follow-ups.

In the absence of that, we’ll have to do the heavy lifting ourselves.

Are we up to it? We’d better be."

Part 3
Opinion | This Is the Dying Phase of Reaganism—and It's Hideous | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/18/dying-phase-reaganism-and-its-hideous

#NeoLiberalism
#Reaganism
#GOPInBedWithRich
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"...As the GOP’s game of shilling for corporations and the morbidly rich became obvious, support for the party slipped. Needing more votes to gain and hold political office, Republicans reached out to bigots, racists, misogynists, antisemites, and open fascists. Each slice of that poison pie gave them a few percent more votes.

When working class white men realized they’d been screwed by 40 years of Reaganism, they were unsure where to focus their rage.

Republican politicians and right-wing media were happy to supply the villains: women in the workplace when they should be home barefoot and pregnant; racial minorities who “want your job” or to “rape your daughter”; and queer people who are “after your children.”

Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign for president with a speech to an all-white audience near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three Civil Rights activists were brutally murdered. His topic was “state’s rights.”

Bush the Elder rolled out his Willy Horton ad and George the younger lied us into two wars with Muslim nations.

Finally, like an evil Santa, Trump dumped out his bag of malice, malevolence, and odium. He embraced the world’s worst despots, seeing them as role models for a future America, while trashing our allies and disparaging democracy. He applauded police violence and ridiculed its victims.

Demagogues like DeSantis and Abbott further raised the temperature by accusing career public school teachers of promoting “Critical Race Theory” and librarians of hustling perversion and porn.

They used desperate refugees as human pawns in their vicious game. They purged millions of mostly Black, Hispanic, and young voters from the rolls, a process endorsed by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2018.

Our most recent Republican President of the United States is hawking NFT art and facing decades in prison in multiple state and federal venues for his crimes while in office.

Now, at the end of these forty-one short years of this unrelenting barrage of corruption and hate promoted by Republican media and politicians, we’ve arrived at the end stage of Reaganism. As a result, our nation stands upon a precipice:

Will we continue down Reagan’s path that I charted in my book on neoliberalism and end up, as did Russia and Hungary, with neofascist strongman rule and a total collapse of the American experiment?

Or will we turn back to the lessons of the New Deal and Great Society, embraced by presidents and politicians of both parties for a half-century, and rebuild our middle class and our democracy, along with our trust in each other?

For most of the past 41 years the choice has not been as clear to as many people as it is today. Now that America can no long plead uncertainty, we must seize hold of the awesome responsibility for rescuing our nation and her democracy from the extraordinary damage of Reagan’s neoliberalism.

For ourselves, our nation, our children and grandchildren, and the larger world."

Part 2
Opinion | This Is the Dying Phase of Reaganism—and It's Hideous | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/18/dying-phase-reaganism-and-its-hideous

#NeoLiberalism
#Reaganism
#GOPInBedWithRich
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"...Prior to this, from the end of the Republican Great Depression right up until the Reagan Revolution — from 1933 to 1981 — the American middle class had a half-century of uninterrupted political and economic progress. About two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class when Reagan was elected in 1980.

Before Reagan, we’d passed the right to unionize, which built America’s first middle class. We passed unemployment insurance and workplace safety rules to protect workers. Social Security largely ended poverty among the elderly, and Medicare provided them with health security.

A top personal income tax rate between 74% and 91% throughout that period kept wages strong for working people and prevented the corrosive wealth inequality we see today. We didn’t get our first billionaire until after the Reagan revolution.

America built colleges that were free or affordable; gleaming new nonprofit hospitals; the world’s finest system of public schools; and new roads, bridges, rail, and airports from coast to coast.

We cleaned up the environment with the Environmental Protection Agency, cleaned up politics with the Federal Elections Commission, cleaned up corporate backroom deals with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We outlawed banks from gambling with our deposits via the Glass-Steagall law.

Then the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with the Buckley and Bellotti decisions (and tripled-down on them both with Citizens United in 2010).

Reagan was the first modern American president to jump through this newly opened door to giving government favors to corporations and wealthy individuals who threw their money at his political party.

He installed America’s first anti-labor Secretary of Labor, our first anti-environmentalist in charge of the EPA (Neal Gorsuch’s mother, Anne), our first anti-public-schools crusader as Secretary of Education, and our first end-times “Jesus will make all things new” fanatic in charge of selling off public lands as Secretary of the Interior.

He cut the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% to 27%, and tore the top rate for corporations from 50% down to 25%.

To pay for both, he tripled the national debt.

He crushed unions, starting with one of only three that had supported his candidacy: the Professional Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO). He gutted federal support to education, kicking off what is today’s student debt crisis.

He froze the minimum wage. He cut federal benefits to the poor, pregnant women, and the mentally ill, kicking off today’s crisis of homelessness. He encouraged corporations to send our jobs overseas in an orgy of “free trade.”

As a result, money flowed into the GOP like an unending river, continuing to this moment. The result we see today, after a mere 41 years, is stark.

Republican-leaning businesses bought up radio stations from coast-to-coast and put “conservative” talk radio into every town and city in America. Wealthy people began running for political office or supporting those politicians who’d do their bidding.

Conservative donors demanded right-wing economics and political science professors in universities across America. Right-wing think tanks and publishers were funded to support them. Billionaires founded a movement to pack our courts, including the Supreme Court.

As a result, seven years ago the American middle class ceased to be half of us: it went from two-thirds of Americans when Reagan took office to 49 percent in 2015. NPR commemorated it with the headline: “The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class.”

Last year, according to statistics from the US Census and the Fed, middle class households also sank below the top 1% in total wealth. Last year’s most clear-eyed headline went to Bloomberg: “Top 1% of U.S. Earners Now Hold More Wealth Than All of the Middle Class.”"

Opinion | This Is the Dying Phase of Reaganism—and It's Hideous | Thom Hartmann https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/12/18/dying-phase-reaganism-and-its-hideous

#NeoLiberalism
#Reaganism
#GOPInBedWithRich
#WantTheirSerfsBack

"The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised, destroy the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.

Back in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in and implicitly promised to destroy our government because it was “the problem,” many of us who strongly opposed him wondered what the final stage of Reaganism would look like.

Now we know. We’re there.

Violence toward women and minorities has exploded. Armed militias tried to assassinate the Vice President and Speaker of the House in an attempted coup directed by the Republican President of the United States. They tried to kidnap and murder the Democratic governor of Michigan. They’re blowing up power substations from Oregon to the Carolinas. They’ve embedded themselves in DHS, police departments, and our military. They’re coordinating with fascists overseas.

Leading up to this moment was a 41-year political war that splattered the American Dream like gut-shot blood across a dystopian Republican hellscape mural.

Reaganism brought us:
— the collapse of the middle class;
— student and medical debt that’s impossible to climb out of;
— an explosion of predation from health insurance companies and for-profit hospitals;
— political manipulation by corporations and billionaires;
— an explosion of homelessness and untreated mental illness;
— and turned our elementary schools into killing fields.

The question today is whether we as a nation and a people will recover from it, or if it will, as Reagan promised on January 20, 1981, end the American experiment of pluralistic liberal democracy.

The seeds of Reaganism were planted in 1972 when President Nixon put tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell on the US Supreme Court.

Powell had written his infamous “Memo” a year earlier, arguing that corporate America and the morbidly rich needed to join forces to wrest back control of America after forty years of FDR’s New Deal had empowered middle class union workers, consumers, and environmentalists.

Attacking Ralph Nader... for kicking off the consumer movement with his 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed and Rachel Carson for the environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring, Powell asserted that “leftists” — middle class socialists and communist sympathizers — had taken over our government, universities, the Supreme Court, and our media:

“Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen’s views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to ‘consumerism’ or to the ‘environment.’”

It was the job of big business and the very wealthy to reclaim our nation from the clutches of people concerned about the environment or the rights of average American consumers, Powell wrote:

“Business must learn the lesson, long ago learned by labor and other self-interest groups. This is the lesson that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination — without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.”

Once on the Supreme Court, Powell went to work. In 1976, he and his colleagues considered a case that would redefine the next five decades: Buckley v Valeo.

Congress passed strict regulations on political campaign fundraising and spending with the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. Following the Agnew and Nixon bribery scandals (that led to Vice President Agnew’s resignation to avoid prison), Congress doubled-down by strengthening that law in 1974 and creating the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).

This outraged then-Senator James Buckley, the elder brother of the late William F. Buckley and now the Senior Judge for the DC Circuit Court. Most Republicans opposed those laws and agencies but he and his side in the Senate had lost the vote, so limits on money in political campaigns became law and the FEC was created.

Like a sore loser, he sued, essentially saying that the “free speech” right of wealthy people like himself and his friends to buy off politicians was inhibited by such clean-campaign legislation.

The result, legalizing political bribery, was a first for America and the developed world. The Supreme Court ruled with and for Buckley, striking down nearly a century of campaign finance legislation going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt’s Tillman Act.

Two years later, in the First National Bank v Bellotti case, Powell himself authored the decision that gave corporations that same legal right to bribe politicians or insert themselves into campaigns for ballot initiatives (among other things)."