#Thom Hartmann

[tomorrowusa]

« The simple reality is that Trump has entered the Fat Elvis phase of his career.

He hasn’t grown or developed new routines; he’s just reliving his old hits every day, playing to a nostalgic and mostly elderly audience who fondly remember his glory days. »

— Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann commenting at Daily Kos about the latest stage of Donald Trump's political career.

Poor Elvis!

[contemplatingoutlander]

THOM HARTMANN: Science Explains Why Republicans Can’t Accept Trump’s Guilt (Sept. 12, 2023)

Scientists discovered a fascinating reason why Republicans can’t accept criticism of Donald Trump. Thom explains.

In the above video, Thom Hartmann refers to a Raw Story column by cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, PhD (shown below):

Here are some excerpts from Azarian's column:

In 2009, a study published in PLOS ONE challenged our understanding of belief systems. Researchers placed participants into the confines of an fMRI scanner and presented them with a mixture of factual and abstract statements. The results were illuminating. Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference for easy belief makes sense; a perpetually skeptical individual questioning every piece of information would struggle to adapt in a fast-paced world. What does all this have to do with Trump supporters? Well, it’s far less cognitively demanding for them to believe anything their leader tells them. Any challenge to what Trump tells them is true takes mental work. This means there is a psychological incentive for Trump loyalists to maintain their loyalty. (I wrote about this phenomenon in a slightly different context in the Daily Beast article "Religious Fundamentalism: A Side Effect of Lazy Brains?") Molding of belief: neuroplasticity at play Now, let's consider the unique predicament faced by individuals who staunchly support Trump and want him to again become president. From the moment Trump began his political career and his social engineering career, his supporters have been exposed to narratives — Trump doesn't lie, Democrats are communists, the media is an enemy of the people — that emphasize loyalty and trust in their political idol. These narratives often steer away from critical examination and instead encourage blind faith. When coupled with the brain's inherent tendency to accept rather than question, it creates an ideal environment for unwavering allegiance. No matter that Trump, time and again, has been revealed to be a serial liar, habitually misrepresenting matters of great consequence, from elections to economics to public health. For example, in the Psychology Today article "Why Evangelicals are Wired to Believe Trump’s Falsehoods," I explain that the children of Christian fundamentalists typically begin to suppress critical thinking at an early age. This is required if one is to accept Biblical stories as literal truth, rather than metaphors for how to live life practically and with purpose. Attributing natural occurrences to mystical causes discourages youth from seeking evidence to back their beliefs. Consequently, the brain structures that support critical thinking and logical reasoning don't fully mature. This paves the way for heightened vulnerability to deceit and manipulative narratives, especially from cunning political figures. Such increased suggestibility arises from a mix of the brain's propensity to accept unverified claims and intense indoctrination. Given the brain's neuroplastic nature, which allows it to shape according to experiences, some religious followers are more predisposed to accept improbable assertions. In other words, our brains are remarkably adaptable and continuously evolving landscapes. For ardent Trump supporters, residing in an environment that prioritizes faith over empirical evidence can reshape the neural circuits within their brains. [color emphasis added]

[edited]

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Thom Hartmann

Kevin Roberts, who heads the Heritage Foundation (largely responsible for Project 2025) just implicitly threatened Americans that if we don’t allow him and his hard-right movement to complete their transformation of America from a democratic republic into an authoritarian state, there will be blood in the streets.

“We’re in the process of taking this country back,” he told a TV audience, adding: “The reason that they are apoplectic right now, the reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example, are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning. And so I come full circle on this response and just want to encourage you with some substance that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

He’s not wrong. America has been changed as a result of a series of corrupt rulings by Republicans (exclusively; not one of these rulings has been joined by a Democratic appointee) which have changed America’s legal and political systems themselves.

As Roberts notes, this is really the largest issue we all face, and our mainstream media are totally failing to either recognize or clearly articulate how radically different our country is now, how far the Republicans on the Court have dragged us away from both our Founder’s vision and the norms and standards of a functioning, modern democratic republic.

First, in a series of decisions — the first written by that notorious corporatist Lewis Powell (of “Powell Memo” fame) — Republicans on the Court have functionally legalized bribery of politicians and judges by both the morbidly rich and massive corporations.

This started with Powell’s 1978 Bellotti opinion, which opened the door (already cracked a bit) to the idea that corporations are not only “persons” under the Constitution, but, more radically, are entitled to the human rights the Framers wrote into the Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments).

Using that rationale, Powell asserted that corporations, like rich people (from the Buckley decision that preceded Belotti by two years), are entitled to the First Amendment right of free speech. But he took it a radical step farther, ruling that because corporations don’t have mouths they can use to speak with, their use of money to spend supporting politicians or carpet-bombing advertising for a candidate or issue is free speech that can’t be tightly regulated.

Citizens United, another all-Republican decision with Clarence Thomas the deciding vote (after taking millions in bribes), expanded that doctrine for both corporations and rich people, creating new “dark money” systems that wealthy donors and companies can use to hide their involvement in their efforts to get the political/legal/legislative outcomes they seek.

Last week the Republicans on the Court took even that a huge step farther, declaring that when companies or wealthy people give money to politicians in exchange for contracts, legislation, or other favors, as long as the cash is paid out after the deed is done it’s not a bribe but a simple “gratuity.”

So, first off, they’ve overthrown over 240 years of American law and legalized bribery.

Last week they also gutted the ability of federal regulatory agencies to protect average people, voters, employees, and even the environment from corporations that seek to exploit, pollute, or even engage in wage theft. This shifted power across the economic spectrum from a government elected by we the people to the CEOs and boards of directors of some of America’s most predatory and poisonous companies.

Finally, in the Trump immunity case, the Court ruled that presidents are immune from prosecution under criminal law, regardless of the crimes they commit, so long as they assert those crimes are done as part of their “official” responsibilities. And who decides what’s “official”? The six Republicans on the Supreme Court.

These actions — corporate personhood, money as speech, ending the Chevron deference to regulatory agencies, and giving the president life-and-death powers that historically have only been held by kings, shahs, mullahs, dictators, and popes — have fundamentally altered the nature of our nation.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the significance of this, or its consequences. We no longer live in America 1.0; this is a new America, one more closely resembling the old Confederacy, where wealthy families and giant companies make the rules, enforce the rules, and punish those who irritate or try to obstruct them.

In America 2.0, there is no right to vote; governors and secretaries of state can take away your vote without even telling you (although they still must go to court to take away your gun).

They can destroy any politician they choose by simply pouring enough cash into the campaign system (including dark, untraceable cash).

The president can now go much farther than Bush’s torturing and imprisoning innocent people in Gitmo without legal process: he can now shoot a person on Fifth Avenue in plain sight of the world and simply call it a necessary part of his job. Or impoverish or imprison you or me with the thinnest of legal “official” rationales.

America 2.0 is not a democracy; it’s an oligarchy, as I wrote about in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. The South has finally — nearly — won the Civil War.

While it will be months or more likely years before all of these new powers the Republicans on the Court have given the president, rich people, and corporations begin to dawn on most Americans, they will, step-by-step transform this country into something more closely resembling Hungary or Russia than the democracies of Europe and Southeast Asia.

The only remedy at this late stage in this 50+ yearlong campaign to remake America is a massive revolt this fall at the ballot box, turning Congress — by huge majorities — over to Democrats while holding the White House.

If we fail at this, while there will be scattered pockets of resistance for years, it’ll be nearly impossible to reverse the course that America’s rightwing billionaires have set us on.

There has never been a more critical time in the history of our nation outside of the last time rich oligarchs tried to overthrow our democracy, the Civil War. Like then, the stakes are nothing less than the survival of a nation of, by, and for we the people.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Thom Hartmann at TNR:

Republicans don’t want women to vote. They now think they may have a strategy that could prevent them from doing so. House Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Donald Trump were pushing the Safeguard American Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, demanding it be part of must-pass legislation to fund the federal government for another year (the funding runs out at the end of this month, and then the shutdown begins).

It died in the House Wednesday night, but, like a bad penny, you can bet it’ll return.* Trump, on his failing social media site, ranted Tuesday that Republicans must get “every ounce” of the SAVE Act passed or shut down the government “in any way, shape, or form.” He said it was necessary because Democrats are “registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak,” adding the vicious lie that “they will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election.” Trump, Johnson, and J.D. Vance claim that the SAVE Act is necessary to prevent people who aren’t citizens from voting, but they are entirely unable to prove that any meaningful number of noncitizens have ever illegally voted in any American election. After all, it’s a felony for a noncitizen to vote, and few are stupid enough to take that sort of a chance. Republicans love to point out that occasionally noncitizens end up on the voting rolls of various states. Oregon, for example, just found that 306 noncitizens were on the voting rolls because they were incorrectly added when they renewed their drivers’ licenses; two had voted because they were mailed ballots and didn’t know better. The state has fixed this error.

But Republicans have absolutely no evidence of any election, anywhere in America, at any time in our history that was ever changed by noncitizens voting. Or of any conspiracy to encourage noncitizens to vote.

[...] So why is this the hill Republicans are willing to die on? Why would Johnson, Trump, and Vance (and so many other Republicans) put so much effort into a lie that will, if acted on, create chaos for American voters?

And why try so hard to force it into a must-pass bill when it has already passed the House of Representatives on a stand-alone vote? The question contains the seed of its own answer. The SAVE Act is a proposed federal law, so, first off, it would put a future president (say, Trump) in charge of enforcing it, taking that power away from the states. Millions of voter registrations in any states the president decides are problematic could be removed until those voters “cure” their registrations, and state authorities would have no say in it. And what will the law require citizens who want to vote do? Lacking a passport or other proof of citizenship with their married names, they must produce both a birth certificate (with the seal of the state where it was issued; no copies allowed) and a current form of identification—both with the exact same name on them. That could instantly disqualify about 90 percent of all married women without passports or other proof that matches their birth certificates or proof of a legal name change.

For women in that situation, they can still register to vote if they can prove that they went to court to change their name when they got married, but most women just start using their new married name without ever going through all those formalities (although a few states recognize marriage as a legal name change).

This New Republic article from Thom Hartmann is a masterclass.

The Republicans’ War On Women has expanded to voting rights, as most women who marry do change their name, and that more women vote Democratic.

The SAVE Act is full of poppycock and a waste of time bill that causes more problems than it solves with dealing the phantom “noncitizen” voter crisis.

[lenbryant]

Great take from Thomas Hartmann. Scrub past the ads.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[hezigler]

KAMALA HARRIS PICKS VP: TIM WALZ! | Christopher Titus | Armageddon Update

The greatest failure of our democratic republic is that of the fourth estate.

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." John Kenneth Galbraith

[thatstormygeek]

The simple reality is that the future of American democracy is as much on the line in this case as it was in 1866. That was completely lost in yesterday’s arguments: it should have been central to them. So, why did even the “liberal” wing of the Court go along with this charade? Was it because, like Mitt Romney said of his Republican Senate colleagues who failed to convict Trump in his second impeachment, they were afraid for their own safety?

[...]

This is how fascists and authoritarians have seized and held power for all the millennia we’ve had what we call civilization: by inducing terror. Just ask Ruby Freeman or Paul Pelosi. Or read Shakespeare or the Bible. Or talk with Alexi Navalny’s wife. Did they never learn in American History class that there was a time, spanning about a generation, when democracy had been replaced by strongman oligarchy in the South and Trump is merely echoing the values and postures of that time? That the 14th Amendment was written to prevent or rescue us from exactly today’s situation?

[arlengrossman]

Are Billionaires Simply Money Addicts - Like Scrooge McDuck?

Why are the GOP and billionaires so committed to gutting worker protections while increasing the wealth of the top one percent? By Thom Hartmann/ HartmannReport.com/ May 7, 2024 Do elite Republicans and the CEOs who fund them hate working people? Or are they simply unable to control themselves, even when deep down inside they know they’re ruining America? In Ohio, there’s a growing statewide…

[gothicvalentine]

Is 2024 the Last Election Women Can Vote If this Plot To Strip Women Of ...

This has some really important info. 

I was not aware that voter ID laws disproportionality affect women. In some states, you can be asked to present your birth certificate alongside your driver’s license, but if your birth certificate doesn’t match your ID exactly, you can be turned away.

Most married women take their husband’s last name and thus would be affected by this. Also, it is apparently required by law to formally change your name with your state even when you’ve been married. It’s technically illegal (this may vary by state) to just start using your husband’s last name. 

Apparently it’s never enforced, but this content creator is concerned that in the states with the strictest voter ID requirements, the states might start enforcing this type of thing in order to keep women from voting. Considering, of course, that women are expected to be the ones who will turn up to vote in droves due to all the anti abortion laws being enacted and the talks of a nationwide ban being the next step in the republican playbook. Because they think those damn women should just shut up and do what they’re told. And it’s not right that some of them can still travel out of state to get an abortion. /s

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Louise and I got home Saturday from a week with extended family in Central America. On the drive from our rented vacation condo by the Pacific Ocean back to the airport, we passed miles of slums or barrio bajos. Some homes were made from scavenged cinderblock and brick, but most were scrap wood and cardboard with tarps as roofs. Along the rudimentary streets ran ditches filled with raw sewage, and electricity was hijacked from streetlights.

Back in the 1980s, when I was doing international relief work for the German-based Salem organization, I spent months in such places in Uganda, Peru, Kenya, Colombia, Mexico, southern Sudan, Ecuador, Peru, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and several other “Third World” countries. At that time, four decades ago, the “slums” in America looked like high-quality housing compared to those countries, with most having electricity, running water, and reliable sewer systems.

But no longer: America has an entirely new type of slum we haven’t seen here since the 1930s, the product of 42 years of the Reagan Revolution. We call them “tent cities,” along with their more upscale neighbors:  roadsides lined with old RVs and cars in which desperate or hopeless people live.

Instead of referring to their denizens as slum-dwellers, we call them the “homeless,” and their numbers have grown so large in the past decade of our neoliberal experiment that they signal an undeniable national housing crisis.

America, in other words, is more and more resembling a Third World nation.

But why?

Homelessness and slums like these aren’t an accident or act of G-d; they’re the result of intentional policy decisions made by politicians. They reflect the confluence of multiple choices we’ve made as a nation over the past four decades, choices that were sold to us by the morbidly rich with the promise that their increases in wealth would “trickle down” to the rest of us even as they cut services and raised the retirement age to 67.

Historically, the wealth or poverty of a nation has first reflected its natural resource base. Countries with lots of stuff under or growing above the ground that can be exported or used as energy end up with lots of money and, broadly, a healthy society.

A nation sitting on billions of barrels of oil will generally have a wealthier populace (Saudi Arabia, UAE) than one living on scrub brush and desert (South Sudan).

The exception to this is the application of human labor and ingenuity to whatever natural resources may be available. Japan, for example, is a relatively resource-poor nation but has maximized arable land through terraced rice farming and used manufacturing — importing raw materials and exporting finished goods — to create wealth that’s turned it into a First World nation.

America is both resource rich (from arable land to minerals and fuels) and was once the manufacturing floor of the world, producing extraordinary wealth across the land. By the 1950s we were the first large nation in the world to have a middle class made up of more than half its population, largely because of our manufacturing base, supplemented by our resource sectors.

But then Reagan brought America some new ideas, rejecting classical economics — from Adam Smith in 1776 to John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s — and embraced a new system called neoliberalism by its founders, as I lay out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.

The theory was that if we just abandoned government regulation and taxation of large companies and the morbidly rich, it would free them up to turbocharge our national prosperity. The newly created wealth, Reagan Republicans told us, would be shared by all.

Of course, that’s not how it worked out.

Instead, neoliberalism has reduced our middle class from almost two-thirds of us in 1980 to fewer than 45 percent of us today; thrown two generations into massive student and healthcare debt; produced a handful of morbidly rich individuals and families; and created a housing crises that rivals the Hoovervilles of the Republican Great Depression.

Reagan promised American workers if they’d go along with his war on organized labor that wages and benefits would go up because companies would no longer be “burdened” with having to work things out with “union bosses.” This new “right to work for less” would, he said, make us all richer.

Instead, cutting union membership from a third of our workers down to around 6 percent of the private workforce has caused wages to stagnate so badly that the standard of living a single full-time worker could provide his family in 1980 now requires at least two full-time workers. While “household income” (the number Republicans love to cite) has risen slightly in the past 42 years, individual income relative to living expenses has collapsed.

Reagan promised us that if we’d stop enforcing anti-trust laws (as he did in 1983) and let giant companies become ever bigger, the increased efficiencies and economies of scale would translate into a widespread prosperity.

Instead, giant monopolistic and oligopolistic corporations have used their increased efficiency to run small- and medium-sized competitors out of business, reducing our urban downtowns and rural cities to ghost towns. The pharaonic wealth produced by these giant corporations is tightly held by their largest investors and senior executives.

Reagan promised us that if we’d just cut the “tax burden” on the wealthiest Americans and our largest and most profitable corporations it would provoke morbidly rich “job creators” to use that extra cash to hire millions more Americans and give everybody a raise.

Instead, billionaires are buying half-billion-dollar super-yachts, private jets, and shooting themselves and their rich buddies into outer space while paying an average 3 percent income tax.

Reagan promised us if we’d just follow Milton Friedman’s advice (when he was secretly being paid off by the real estate lobby) and end rent controls, cut home mortgage subsidies like those through the FHA and VA, and throw our housing markets open to unrestrained speculation and both corporate and foreign ownership, every American could live the American Dream.

Instead, foreign investors and massive hedge funds run by Wall Street billionaires are buying up America’s housing stock and turning it into rental properties, both exploding the price of houses and rents. The clear and measurable result is an epidemic of homelessness and the tent cities I mentioned at the start of this article.

Reagan promised us if we’d just end the “oppressive regulations” designed to keep our food supply safe, our drugs affordable, clean up our air and water, and protect our children from death by firearms the “magic of the free market” would instead provide all those things in spades.

Instead, our food supply is filled with chemicals, microplastics, and heavily processed faux foods that have produced two generations of obesity and related metabolic disorders in children along with an explosion of cancer, birth defects, and other once-rare diseases.

Reagan promised us if we’d just stop funding public schools and stop teaching civics and instead direct that money to private for-profit or church-run voucher and charter schools it would grow the levels of literacy, civic engagement, and healthy political dialogue.

Instead, about half of all American adults cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. Only 39 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government, leaving our nation vulnerable to racist white nationalists and fascists wanting to transform the democratic experiment our Founders began with this American republic.

Reagan promised us, as he and George HW Bush were negotiating the GATT/WTO and NAFTA, that if we’d just abandon 191 years of protectionist tariffs and trade policy so American companies could move their manufacturing overseas, we’d see an eruption of high-paying white-collar jobs in technology without having to get grease under our fingernails.

Instead, over 60,000 factories left this nation, moving at least 16 million good-paying and previously unionized manufacturing jobs to mostly China. When I lived and studied in Beijing in late 1986, the country was impoverished. Today, China’s manufacturing sector — built over the past 30+ years by American “free trade” policy with American inventions and technology — is double the manufacturing capacity of the US.

Policy Tensor @policytensorI had to see with my own eyes. In terms of value-added at market rates, China ($4.9tn) is now as big a mfg power as US ($2.5tn) and EU ($2.5tn) COMBINED. 👀  Richard Baldwin @BaldwinREFYI chart: shocking share shift https://t.co/OrN3TM3fg2

8:45 AM ∙ Mar 10, 2023236Likes118Retweets

Reagan promised us if we’d just deregulate our media and abandon local ownership requirements for newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets that we’d end up with a flourishing, diverse, and edifying media sector. He kicked it off by ending enforcement of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and Bill Clinton carried it forward with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Instead, a small handful of billionaires and rightwing companies own virtually every consequential radio and TV station in the country; most of our local newspapers are bankrupt; more than half of the ones left are owned by a couple of New York-based hedge funds; and hate, lies, and disinformation have proven more effective at driving profits than honest information or concern for the public good so they’ve become an unscrupulous business model on the right.

Reagan promised us if we’d stop blindly trusting our government to do the right thing, a healthy skepticism would make our country’s bureaucracies more efficient. After all, he claimed, there are no truly competent people working in government because, if they were really talented, they’d be out making more money in private industry.

Instead of getting a more efficient government we ended up with an entire political party made up of fascist-tolerant hacks, sellouts, and opportunists anxious to dance to the tune of any billionaire willing to fund their way of life. They now populate the majority of the Supreme Court, the federal court system, control the House of Representatives, and run about half of our states.

Reagan promised us if we’d just drop all those silly regulations on gun ownership and throw the doors open to weapons of war in civilian hands, the result would be “an armed society is a polite society.”

Instead, bullets are the number one killer of our children and the GOP’s answer to “the crisis of our youth” is to ban drag shows.

Reagan promised us if we’d just kill off the “welfare” programs of the New Deal and Great Society, then Americans would no longer be infuriated when a “strapping young buck” was using food stamps to “buy a T-Bone steak,” while “you were waiting in line to buy hamburger.”

Instead, as the social safety net collapsed, poverty became more deeply entrenched and hunger among America’s children has increased since the 1980s.

Years ago, I was up late one night in an Asian city watching financial news on a hotel TV. A young American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.

Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”

“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the young man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”

There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. Like the Patriotic Millionaires group, they embrace an opportunity to help our country, often via Democratic politicians.

But the billionaires who fund the Republican Party and own right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the moral and political guts out of their own nation, condemn its future to severe weather, and turn its people against each other if it helps them fill their money bins.

They’ve funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox “News” and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC.

They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the “deregulate, cut, denigrate” line about American government. They sponsor climate denial, anti-abortion, and pro-death penalty legislation to get enough political power to increase their own profits through buying deregulation.

And, increasingly, Americans of all stripes are realizing this truth.

I’ve lived seven decades in this country, and have literally traveled pretty much everywhere, from hitchhiking from Michigan to San Francisco and back in 1967 to raising a family and living in five different states, to traveling for business to almost every other state.

But it wasn’t until America got seriously whacked, the endpoint of 40 years of austerity politics and Reaganomics combined with the stress of the century’s worst pandemic, that it became absolutely unavoidable.

I’ve never in all that time — and I’ll bet this is true of you, too, regardless of how old you are — seen tent cities growing across our land like the last five years.

Homelessness that can be directly and scientifically tracked back to one primary cause, which was one of the programs of the Reagan Revolution. That was the explosion in the cost of housing driven by parasitic speculators and Wall Street billionaires following widespread Republican deregulation of housing, particularly at state and local levels.

Reagan’s housing policies, which opened the door to slumlords like Jared Kushner, got the interest and involvement of the speculators from the beginning. They really jumped into the real estate market, though, at its bottom in 2008, and now in some parts of the country as many as half of all houses that are offered for sale get sold to speculators or foreign buyers.

As they drive up home prices and raise their rental rates, cities see eruptions of homelessness.

The Reagan Revolution, as we are confronted with daily, broke our nation.

It set the stage for a cynical George W. Bush to tell his biographer in 1999 that if he was elected president in 2000 he’d start a war in Iraq that would last long enough to get him re-elected in 2004, unlike his father, whose war with Iraq didn’t last long enough. Bush Jr. was our first president to act like a Third World politician, right down to the torture, wiretapping, and secret prisons.

America is now haunted by the daily dozens of suicides among veterans of those two unnecessary, expensive, and illegal wars Bush lied us into.

The Reagan Revolution also set the stage for the Trump administration.

Like Reagan, who tried to destroy the EPA by putting Anne Gorsuch in charge of it (she eventually had to resign in disgrace; her revenge is that her son now sits on the Supreme Court) Trump got rid of more than half its scientific staff.

He then tried to take over the military, the courts, and the Department of Justice including the FBI. Just like a classic Third World strongman dictator.

And that, of course, was just the beginning of Trump’s corruption of our government, his infiltration of fascists and white supremacists into our systems who, in far too many cases, are still in place and sabotaging things.

Trump’s holdovers appear to have dissuaded the FBI and DOJ from investigating and prosecuting Trump and the insider senior officials around him for more than two years, until shamed into a quick handoff to Jack Smith by a Congressional committee.

Even Mike Pence went along with the coup until the last minute, when he finally realized it couldn’t work and then pretended he was outraged. Sort of. Years later. Without giving testimony under oath. Like a Third World political opportunist.

The Reagan Revolution and the corruption it brought to Washington, DC and state capitols across the land — think Kari Lake, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Scott Walker, or Kristi Noem — changed the very nature of America.

The question for today is whether, how, and at what cost we can right our nation and repair Reagan’s, Bush’s and Trump’s damage.

[fspgrad]

Ted Cruz needs to be held accountable for his role in trying to overthrow the government. Indict and arrest this fucking traitor.

[contemplatingoutlander]

The Two Santa Claus Theory: Republican Strategy to Dismantle the Social Safety Net | Thom Hartmann Program

It is no secret that the Republicans are working very hard to achieve their goals, their control over congress, the presidency and more is a frightening reminder of the power of working with a strategy in mind. But what exactly is this strategy? It’s being used to dismantle the Democratic party and even the social safety net as we speak and it places Democrats at a choice that seems pretty morbid. The method is called the two Santa Claus Theory.

Starting with Reagan, GOP also plunged the nation into increasing debt. They devised a sinister plan known as The Two Santa Clause Scheme. Recognizing that Democrats were trying to spend tax dollars to help the largest segment of the public, GOP viewed the Democrats as Santa Claus. To combat the Democratic Santa Claus, they constructed their own Santa Claus; the GOP Tax Cut Santa Claus. The scheme was to use the GOP Tax Cut Santa Claus to provide gifts to the taxpayer when a GOPster POTUS was in office. The people loved tax cuts, but the national debt skyrocketed under Reagan, Bush "The Shrub", and Orange Mob Boss. When a Democratic President was in office, the Two Santa Claus Scheme was to rail against the national debt (which GOP's Tax Cut Santa Claus caused) and blame the Democratic Party as the party of profligate spending. This is not a secret. The Debt Ceiling Debacle of the McCarthy House of Horrors is a case in point that this scheme continues. Yet, no one in the Democratic Party; including President Biden, is willing to expose this sinister scheme.

--Arthur J. Montana, comment to a Washington Post opinion column

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Thom Hartmann

Back in 1967, a friend of mine and I hitchhiked from East Lansing, Michigan to San Francisco to spend the summer in Haight-Ashbury. One ride dropped us off in Sparks, Nevada, and within minutes of putting our thumbs out a city police car stopped and arrested us for vagrancy.

The cop, a young guy with an oversized mustache who was apologetic for the city’s policy, drove us to the desert a mile or so beyond the edge of town, where we hitchhiked standing by a distressing light-post covered with graffiti reading “39 hours without a ride,” “going on our third day,” and “anybody got any water?”

Vagrancy laws were so 20th century.

Today, the US Supreme Court heard a case involving efforts by the City of Grants Pass, Oregon to keep homeless people off its streets and out of its parks and other public property. The city had tried a number of things when the problem began to explode in the last year of the Trump administration, as The Oregonian newspaper notes:

“They discussed putting them in their old jail, creating an unwanted list, posting signs at the city border or driving people out of town... Currently, officers patrol the city nearly every day, Johnson said, handing out [$295] citations to people who are camping or sleeping on public property or for having too many belongings with them.”

The explosion in housing costs has triggered two crises: homelessness and inflation. The former is harming the livability of our cities and towns, and the Fed’s reaction to the latter threatens an incumbency-destroying recession just as we head into what will almost certainly be the most important election in American history.

The problem with housing inflation is so severe today that without it the nation’s overall core CPI inflation rate would be in the neighborhood of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s 2% goal.

Graphic based on BLM data and interpretation by The Financial Times

Both homelessness and today’s inflation are the result of America — unlike many other countries — allowing housing to become a commodity that can be traded and speculated in by financial markets and overseas investors.

Forty-three years into America’s Reaganomics experiment, homelessness has gone from a problem to a crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street — a prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign — is helping cause it.

32% seems to be the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32% of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes.

And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing.

It wasn’t always this way in America.

Housing prices have spun out of control since my dad bought his house in 1957 when I was six years old. He got a Veteran’s Administration-subsidized loan and picked up the brand-new 3-bedroom-1-bath ranch house my 3 brothers and I grew up in, in suburban south Lansing, Michigan. It cost him $13,000, which was about twice what he made every year working a good union job in a tool-and-die shop.

When my dad bought his home in the 1950s the median price of a single-family house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today, the Fed says, the median house sells for $479,500 while the median American personal income is $41,000 — a ratio of more than ten-to-one between housing costs and annual income.

As the Zillow study notes:

“Across the country, the rent burden already exceeds the 32% [of median income] threshold in 100 of the 386 markets included in this analysis….”

And wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks like the grim reaper.

We’re told that America’s cities have seen this increase in housing costs since the 1950s in some part because of the growing wealth and population of this country. There were, after all, 168 million people in the US the year my dad bought his house; today there are 330 million.

And it’s true that we haven’t been building enough new housing, particularly low-income housing, as 43 years of neoliberal Reaganomics have driven down wages and income for working-class people relative to all of their expenses while stopping the construction of virtually any new subsidized low-income housing.

But that’s not the only, or even the main dynamic, driving housing prices into the stratosphere — and, as a consequence, the crisis in homelessness — over the past decade. You can thank speculation for much of that.

As the Zillow-funded study noted:

“This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability — the share of income people spend on rent — crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”

So how did we get here?

It started with a wave of foreign buyers over the past 30 years (particularly from China, Canada, Mexico, India and Colombia) who, in just the one single year of 2020, picked up over 154,000 homes as their way of parking money in America. Which is part of why there are over 20 times more empty houses in America than there are homeless people.

As Marketwatch noted in a 2015 article titled “The Danger of Foreign Buyers Gobbling Up American Homes”:

“Unusual high appreciation of the aforementioned urban centers is due to the ever growing influx of foreign buyers — mostly wealthy Chinese — who view American residential real estate as the safest investment commodity. … According to a National Realtors Association survey, the Chinese spent $22 billion on U.S. housing in 12 months through March 2014…. [Other foreign buyers primarily include] Canadians, British, Indians and Mexicans.”

But foreign investment has been down for the past few years; what’s taken over and is really driving home prices today are massive, multi-billion-dollar US-based funds that sweep into neighborhoods and buy everything available, bidding against families and driving up housing prices.

As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville, “In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”

This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg.

“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the Journal article about a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree with trips to the bank…”

The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; the investment goliaths use finely-tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.

After stripping neighborhoods of homes families can buy, they then begin raising rents as high as the market will bear.

In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, for example, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes:

“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”

Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix. Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel.

“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?”

Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor. At the time they were buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.

In 2018, corporations bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, noting that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the homeownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”

This all really took off around a decade ago, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that — in the wake of the 2008 Bush Housing Crash — snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds.

Turns out, Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and The Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premier lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to regulate the industry.

As John Husing, the owner of Economics and Politics Inc., told The Tennessean newspaper:

“What you have are neighborhoods that are essentially unregulated apartment houses. It could be disastrous for the city.”

Meanwhile, as unionization levels here remain among the lowest in the developed world, Reagan’s ongoing war on working people continues to wipe out America’s families.

At the same time that housing prices, both to purchase and to rent, are being driven through the roof by foreign and Wall Street investors, a survey published by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that American families are in crisis.

Their study found:

— “Thirty-eight percent (38%) of [all] households across the nation report facing serious financial problems in the previous few months.

— “There is a sharp income divide in serious financial problems, as 59% of those with annual incomes below $50,000 report facing serious financial problems in the past few months, compared with 18% of households with annual incomes of $50,000 or more.

— “These serious financial problems are cited despite 67% of households reporting that in the past few months, they have received financial assistance from the government.

— “Another significant problem for many U.S. households is losing their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak. Nineteen percent (19%) of U.S. households report losing all of their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak and not currently having any savings to fall back on.

— “At the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction ban expired, 27% of renters nationally reported serious problems paying their rent in the past few months.”

These are not separate issues, and they are driving an explosion in homelessness.

The Zillow study found similarly damning data:

— “Communities where people spend more than 32% of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.

— “Income growth has not kept pace with rents, leading to an affordability crunch with cascading effects that, for people on the bottom economic rung, increases the risk of homelessness.

— “The areas that are most vulnerable to rising rents, unaffordability, and poverty hold 15% of the U.S. population — and 47% of people experiencing homelessness.”

The Zillow study makes grim reading and is worth checking out. In community after community, when rent prices exceeded 32% of median household income, homelessness exploded. It’s measurable, predictable, and is destroying what’s left of the American working class, particularly minorities.

The loss of affordable homes also locks otherwise middle-class families out of the traditional way wealth is accumulated — through homeownership: Over 61% of all American middle-income family wealth is their home’s equity. And as families are priced out of ownership and forced to rent, they become more vulnerable to long-term economic struggles and homelessness.

Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable. This requires government intervention in the so-called “free market.”

— Last year, Canada banned most foreign buyers from buying residential property as a way of controlling their housing inflation.

— New Zealand similarly passed its no-foreigners law (except for Singaporeans and Australians) in 2018.

— Thailand requires a minimum investment of $1.2 million and the equivalent of a green card.

— Greece bans most non-EU citizens from buying real estate in most of the country.

— To buy residential housing in Denmark, it must be your primary residence and you must have lived in the country for at least 5 years.

— Vietnam, Austria, Hungary, and Cyprus also heavily restrict who can buy residential property, where, and under what terms.

This isn’t rocket science; the problem could be easily fixed by Congress if there was a genuine willingness to protect our real estate market from the vultures who’ve been circling it for years.

Unfortunately, when Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote to allow billionaires and hedge funds to legally bribe members of Congress in Citizens United, he and his four fellow Republicans opened the floodgates to “contributions” and “gifts” from foreign and Wall Street interests to pay off legislators to ignore the problem.

Because there’s no lobbying group for the interests of average homeowners or the homeless, it’s up to us to raise hell with our elected officials. The number for the Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.

If ever there was a time to solve this problem — and regulate corporate and foreign investment in American single-family housing — it’s now.

[garudabluffs]

In an upstairs room in Blackpool By the side of a northern sea The army had my father And my mother was having me Military Madness was killing my country Solitary Sadness comes over me After the school was over and I moved To the other side I found a different country but I never Lost my pride Military Madness was killing the country Solitary sadness creeps over me And after the wars are over And the body count is finally filed I hope that The Man discovers What's driving the people wild Military madness is killing your country So much sadness, between you and me War, War, War, War, War, War

the military monoculture*

an invasive species on the brink of extinction manufacturing weapons stockpiling ammunition; if the price of war costs us to lose our minds - rational bipeds? or intelligent design? doesn't matter how it starts or how it ends, let the fun begin! *LIFE! LIBERTY! DEATH to those whose UNIFORMS equip the Best-Dressed for valorous conquest!!

(poem by~jf 10/09/2023)

“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” ― Smedley Butler, War is a Racket

__ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The Moral Equivalent of War[1]

"Peace" in military mouths to-day is a synonym for "war expected.The word has become a pure provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date dictionary should say that "peace" and "war" mean the same thing, now in posse, now in actu. It may even reasonably be said that the intensely sharp competitive preparation for war by the nations is the real war, Permanent, unceasing; and that the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery gained during the "peace" interval."

"The military party denies neither the bestiality nor the horror, nor the expense; it only says that these things tell but half the story. It only says that war is worth them; that, taking human nature as a whole, its wars are its best protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that mankind cannot afford to adopt a peace-economy."When the time of development is ripe the war must come, reason or no reason, for the justifications pleaded are invariably fictitious. War is, in short, a permanent human obligation."

READ MORE https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/James/James_1911_11.html

William James. "The Moral Equivalent of War". Lecture 11 in Memories and Studies. New York: Longman Green and Co (1911): 267-296.

Written for and first published by the Association for International Conciliation (Leaflet No. 27) and also published in McClure's Magazine, August, 1910, and The Popular Science Monthly, October, 1910.

VIDEO audio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdDYievODOI

Something or Someone is Not Going to Save Us from Tyranny 10/09/2023

As much as it pains me to say it (my personal urge toward salvationism is as strong as anybody else’s), nobody is coming to save us...

When the Founders of this nation signed their own death warrants by publicly taking on the most powerful army and navy on Earth in 1776, they were no doubt worried. But they also saw it as a chance to create something wholly new.

As the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote in a June 5, 1824 letter to Major John Cartwright:

“Our Revolution commenced on more favorable ground [than the foundation of English or Biblical law]. It presented us an album on which we were free to write what we pleased. We had no occasion to search into musty records, to hunt up royal parchments, or to investigate the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry. We appealed to those of nature, and found them engraved on our hearts.”

Similarly, an optimistic Thomas Paine wrote:

“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. … We have it in our power to begin the world over again. The birth-day of a new world is at hand.”

READ MORE https://hartmannreport.com/p/something-or-someone-is-not-going-8d9

War is Not an Option: War is Death

"War is wholesale murder." Charlie Chaplin was not the first to point it out. He was not the last one either.

But the point is: War is no ’cause’! War has a cause, not to say multiple causes. But they are never heroic, wonderful or sublime – whatever anyone tells you.

They are driven by interests, of lobbies, of industries, of companies, all those that will make money by selling things for those wars: The weapons The ‘units and kits’ The cars and vehicles The ships The phones and radio transmission devices The food and shelter

All this makes a lot of selling to do. A lot of money, for those who provide the goods. The jobs…

Anything you want to sell needs marketing. That’s equally true of war: They will sell it by making it the only possible way out of a ‘fix’…presenting no alternatives anymore. But that’s propaganda.

War is not a heavenly or sublime cause! Never was, never will be. War is about money. First and last.

READ MORE https://www.barzgaran.at/2023/05/26/war-is-not-an-option-war-is-death/

"Wars, conflicts - it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. Numbers sanctify." Charlie Chaplin as Verdoux said that 61 years ago.

READ MORE https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039631/reviews

COMMENTS "Charles Chaplin's dark vision, "Monsieur Verdoux", was released in 1947, just before the anti-Communist cries against him were to drive him out of America."

"The end of the film is set in 1937 but it's certainly the Chaplin of 1947 who tells us: "As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces? And done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison."

"A whole lot of people were shocked when Monsieur Verdoux came out and instead of the Tramp we got a Bluebeard murderer. Black comedy was not a genre popular in the USA at that time and a lot of people hated this film. None more so than Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper who as a good conservative Republican cheered on the coming blacklist and beat the drums for Chaplin's deportation. No accident that Chaplin was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time Monsieur Verdoux came out."

+ "Given this rather wholesale indictment of many of the West's leading institutions, small wonder he left the country shortly after under a cloud of controversy."

READ MORE https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039631/reviews

[theozgnomian]

Why The Rich Hate Us

He said, she said.

I don't always see eye to eye with Hartmann, but I think he really nailed this one. Just having more money doesn't seem to be enough of a goal for the 1% to be throwing this much effort into making themselves the de-facto rulers of this country. The article's reasoning really holds together.

My wife disagrees, simply because of the display put on by Trump, his family, his Cabinet, and his overall administration. Her reasoning is that, if the 1% were REALLY HELL BENT on control, why would they put their cash into such across-the-board utterly incompetent inept stupid people. If Trump and his lackeys had had even a modicum of the intelligence and talent that they apparently believed they did...and convinced the Republican voters they did....Trump would be Palpatine of the Untied States Empire right now. Stability be damned. The 1% don't care about the stability of the country or the world at all.

I think we're both right. The article talks about stability. Stability for who? Would anyone say we're particularly stable right now? The stability bogey man is a scare tactic, and nothing but. To the plebes like you and us stability means the ability to live your life without wondering when the world is going to go to shit. To the 1% stability = power= money. They're all interchangeable for tokens the purposes of definition and politics. They really believe in "The Golden Rule"....as in "The man who has the gold makes the rules."