The GOP's only real proposals benefit the rich at the expense of the rest of us. Yet their base is too ginned up on hate and outrage to pay attention to what's really going on.

The GOP tax plan is to let the rich pay less and make you pay more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/23/biden-tax-gop-sales-tax/

#GOPInBedWithTheRich
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPHatesAvgAmericans

"President Biden, consistent with his idea of building an economy from “the bottom up and the middle out,” has tried to get the rich and big corporations to pay more taxes. The MAGA GOP, abandoning all pretense of populism, has a scheme to junk the progressive tax code and replace it with a national sales tax, with devastating results for the middle class.

That tells you a lot about the contrasting visions of the two parties. One still fights for the little guy in practical, concrete terms while the other proposes one harebrained scheme after another with no regard to the needs of average Americans.
...
Keeping his promises not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year and to get businesses to pay more, Biden raised $300 billion in revenue in the Inflation Reduction Act by placing a new tax on stock buybacks and enacting a minimum tax on big corporations. To the chagrin of tax cheats (and their sympathetic Republican politicians), the law also boosted funding for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on tax evaders.
...
More far-reaching plans to increase the individual top marginal tax rate, to boost the corporate tax rate, to equalize tax treatment of capital gains and ordinary income for those making more than $400,000, and to eliminate the step-up basis for the estate tax never passed.

The principle underlying all of these measures, which would be comparatively small adjustments that would not hit the vast majority of Americans, was simple: The rich have made out very well and should pay more taxes; working- and middle-class taxpayers shouldn’t.

“Over the past 40 years, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, and too many corporations have lost their sense of responsibility to their workers, their communities and the country,” Biden said in a speech in September 2021. “CEOs used to make about 20 times the average worker in the company that they ran. Today, they make more than 350 times what the average worker in their corporation makes.”
...
That grotesque widening of income inequality offends most Americans, who consistently tell pollsters the rich should pay more.

GOP politicians and their wealthy donors see things differently. The first tax measure proposed by the MAGA House was to try to take back funding for the IRS to chase down tax cheats.

“The debate should focus on one accurate and alarming number: the IRS has 2,284 fewer skilled auditors to handle the sophisticated returns of wealthy taxpayers than it did in 1954,” Chuck Marr of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote. “The decade-long, House Republican-driven budget cuts have created dysfunction at the IRS, where relatively few millionaires are now audited.”

But allowing tax cheats to avoid paying what they legally owe is not the sum total of the GOP thinking on taxes. “As part of his deal to become House speaker,” Semafor reported, “Kevin McCarthy reportedly promised his party’s conservative hardliners a vote on legislation that would scrap the entire American tax code and replace it with a jumbo-sized national sales tax.”

A mammoth 30 percent sales tax would be grossly regressive, socking it to the same working- and middle-class families Republicans ostensibly worry are paying more at the pump and grocery store because of inflation.

...Even Norquist knows that because the poor and middle class spend a much higher percentage of their income on necessities such as food and clothing, the impact would be devastating.

Unsurprisingly Democrats leaped at the chance to blast the scheme. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted:
"Hold on: House Republicans want a national 30% sales tax on everything from groceries to gasoline? They want to raise taxes on working-class & middle-class families while slashing them for millionaires & billionaires?

Are they TRYING to show exactly how out of touch they are?"
...
The GOP plan boils down to this: Let rich tax cheats get away with not paying what they owe while redoing the entire tax system so the overwhelming burden will fall on those less able to pay.
...
The plan is unlikely even to get a vote. But it is indicative of the utter lack of seriousness that pervades the GOP. They throw out one boneheaded idea after another, hoping to please some segment of their base or donors, with nary a care in the world for the needs of their constituents nor for the actual challenges we face."

The GOP and the ones pulling their strings, the obscenely wealthy, have been trying to gut social security, medicare, and any programs, like public education, that help working-class Americans. they are vicious and cruel and get off on hurting the rest of us. They don't care about deficits when it comes to defense spending or tax cuts for the wealthy, but when Dems are in power and social programs are involved, they pretend to be fiscally responsible to mask their naked cruelty!

Paul Krugman: House Republicans will risk a 'financial crisis' to 'slash Social Security and Medicare' - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/debt-ceiling-2659212146/

#GOPHatesAvgAmericans
#TheRichHateUs
#GreedKills
#GreedKillsMorals
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#TheyWantTheirSerfsBack

"In a scathing column published on January 12, Krugman warns that the GOP’s new majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is determined to “slash” Social Security and Medicare and is willing to risk a “financial crisis” in order to do it.

“The Republicans who now control the House will soon try to slash Social Security and Medicare,” Krugman writes. “They plan to achieve this by holding the economy hostage, threatening to create a financial crisis by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling. The interesting questions are why they want to do this, given that it appears politically suicidal, and how Democrats will respond.”

CNN, Krugman notes, has “obtained a screenshot of a slide presented at a closed-door Republican meeting” held on Tuesday, January 10. And the slide outlines some things that Republicans have in mind economically.

“The first bullet point calls for balancing the budget within 10 years, which is mathematically impossible without deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid,” Krugman explains. “The second calls for reforms to ‘mandatory spending’ — which is budget-speak for those same programs. And the final point calls for refusing to raise the debt limit unless these demands are met. So, the plan isn’t a mystery. I would add only that if Republicans try to assure currently retired Americans that their benefits wouldn’t be affected, this promise isn’t feasible — not if they’re serious about balancing the budget within a decade.”

If House Republicans vote to butcher Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, there are two potential obstacles: (1) the U.S. Senate — where Democrats still have a majority — and (2) President Joe Biden, who has the power to veto bills he doesn’t like. But Krugman fears that House Republicans would be willing to use the debt ceiling to “blackmail” Biden. Many economists are warning that if the United States fails to raise the debt ceiling and defaults on its debt obligations, it would trigger a major financial crisis.

“All indications are that at some point this year, the Biden Administration will have to deal with a full-scale effort at economic blackmail, a threat to blow up the economy unless the safety net is shredded,” Krugman writes. “And I worry that Democrats still aren’t taking that threat seriously enough.”

I rarely agree with these two New York Times conservatives about policy, but, the GOP has gotten so crazy that these conservatives don't feel at home and think the party has gone too far down the rabbit hole. The current GOP is bad for a modern liberal democracy but good for nutcases and the obscenely wealthy.

Veteran conservatives decry 'authoritarian' GOP’s 'bad path to the bottom' - Alternet.org https://www.alternet.org/Bank/marjorie-taylor-greene-2659204132/

#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPLongs4Authoritarianism
#GOPLovesPower
#GOPIsALooneyBin

"Although the New York Times’ opinion section is famous for its liberal columnists — including Michelle Goldberg, Jamelle Bouie and economic Paul Krugman — it has had some well-known conservative columnists as well. Two of them are Bret Stephens and David Brooks, neither of whom are happy with the direction that the Trumpified Republican Party has taken in recent years.

In an opinion piece published in the Q&A format on January 11, Stephens and Brooks discuss the GOP’s dysfunction and “path to authoritarianism.” The GOP, they lament, has abandoned traditional Reagan conservatism and taken a radical, anti-intellectual turn. And the conservative columnists cite some of the precursors to Trumpism.

Brooks told Stephens, “My thinking about the GOP goes back to a brunch I had with Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza in the ’80s that helps me see, in retrospect, that people in my circle were pro-conservative, while Ingraham and D’Souza and people in their circle were anti-left. We wanted to champion Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and a Reaganite foreign policy. They wanted to rock the establishment. That turned out to be a consequential difference because almost all the people in my circle back then — like David Frum and Robert Kagan — ended up, decades later, Never Trumpers, and almost all the people in their circle became Trumpers or went bonkers.”

Brooks went on to describe President Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp and Sen. John McCain as Republican “internationalists” of the 1980s and 1990s who were “cosmopolitan” and “believers in the value of immigration” — all the things that “populist” MAGA Republicans are not.

“Then the establishment got discredited: Iraq War, financial crisis, the ossifying of the meritocracy, the widening values gap between metro elites and everybody else,” Brooks told Stephens. “And suddenly, all the people I regarded as fringe and wackadoodle — Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump, anybody who ran CPAC — rose up on the wave of populist fury. Everybody likes a story in which the little guy rises up to take on the establishment, but in this case, the little guys rode in on a wave of know-nothingism, mendacity, an apocalyptic mindset, and authoritarianism.”

Brooks went on to say that while he had been a big admirer of McCain and voted for him in 2000’s GOP presidential primary, he ended up voting for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election after McCain decided to make then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin his running mate.

Stephens told Brooks, “There have been previous Republican presidents who rode to office on waves of populist discontent, particularly Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But as presidents, they channeled the discontent into serious programs and also turned their backs on the ugly fringes of the right. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and expanded the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Reagan established a working relationship with Democratic House leaders to pass tax reform and gave amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.”

Brooks asked Stephens where the “old core of the conservative movement” can “go” when the GOP has become “Matt Gaetz’s clown show.” And Stephens responded, “When people get on a bad path, whether it’s drinking or gambling or political or religious fanaticism, they tend to follow it all the way to the bottom — at which point, they either die or have that proverbial moment of clarity.”

Part 3
The levels of greed displayed by the wealthy and their tools, the GOP, continue to eviscerate the middle class, destroy our social contract and create a dysfunctional society, where caring about each other is looked down upon. The wealthy in other countries are not as greedy, nor do they attempt to destroy democracy, their fellow citizens and "own" the government to the same extent as america's wealthy which are a cancer and parasites on our society.

Why Is the For-Profit Health Industry Like a Giant, Bloodsucking Tick? https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-is-the-for-profit-health-industry?

#CorporateGreed
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPLovesTheRich \
#GOPHatesWorkers
#TheRichHateAmericans

"In 1978, when Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized corporations owning politicians with their Buckley v Bellotti decision (written by Justice Louis Powell of “Powell Memo” fame), they made the entire process of replacing a profitable industry with government-funded programs like single-payer vastly more difficult, regardless of how much good they may do for the citizens of the nation.

The Court then doubled-down on that decision in 2010, when the all-Republican decision on Citizens United cemented the power of billionaires and giant corporations to own politicians and even write and influence legislation and the legislative process.

Medicare For All, like Canada has, would save American families thousands every year immediately and do away with the 500,000+ annual bankruptcies in this country that happen only because somebody in the family got sick.

But it would kill the billions every week in profits of the half-dozen corporate giants that dominate the health insurance industry.

The Covid crisis — which produced an explosion in healthcare debt for American families (but not for those in any other developed nation) — is starting to create considerable pressure for change, but Americans still must overcome the political corruption the Supreme Court wrote into our system with Citizens United.

It’ll be a big lift: keep it on your radar. And if you’d like to let your members of the House and Senate know that you stand with Bernie and in opposition to the GOP, the number for the congressional switchboard, which can connect you to any member, is 202-224-3121."

Part 2
The levels of greed displayed by the wealthy and their tools, the GOP, continue to eviscerate the middle class, destroy our social contract and create a dysfunctional society, where caring about each other is looked down upon. The wealthy in other countries are not as greedy, nor do they attempt to destroy democracy, their fellow citizens and "own" the government to the same extent as america's wealthy which are a cancer and parasites on our society.

Why Is the For-Profit Health Industry Like a Giant, Bloodsucking Tick? https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-is-the-for-profit-health-industry?

#CorporateGreed
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPLovesTheRich \
#GOPHatesWorkers
#TheRichHateAmericans

"The leader of that healthcare-opposition movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a German immigrant named Frederick Hoffman. Hoffman was a senior executive for the Prudential Insurance Company, and wrote several books about the racial inferiority of Black people, a topic he traveled the country lecturing about.

His most well-known book was titled Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. It became a major best-seller across America when it was first published for the American Economic Association by the Macmillan Company in 1896, the same year the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Ferguson decision legally turned the entire US into an apartheid state.

Hoffman taught that Black people, in the absence of slavery, were so physically and intellectually inferior to whites that if they were simply deprived of healthcare the entire race would die out in a few generations. Denying healthcare to Black people, he said, would “solve the race problem in America.”

Southern politicians quoted Hoffman at length, he was invited to speak before Congress, and was hailed as a pioneer in the field of “scientific racism.” Race Traits was one of the most influential books of its era.

By the 1920s, the insurance company he was a vice president of was moving from life insurance into the health insurance field, which brought an added incentive to lobby hard against any sort of a national healthcare plan.

Which brings us to the second reason America has no national healthcare system: profits.

“Dollar” Bill McGuire, a recent CEO of America’s largest health insurer, UnitedHealth, made about $1.5 billion dollars during his time with that company. To avoid prosecution in 2007 he had to cough up $468 million, but still walked away a billionaire. Stephen J Hemsley, his successor, made off with around half a billion.

And that’s just one of multiple giant insurance companies feeding at the trough of your healthcare needs.

Much of that money, and the pay for the multiple senior executives at that and other insurance companies who make over $1 million a year, came from saying “No!” to people who file claims for payment of their healthcare costs.

This became so painful for Cigna Vice President Wendell Potter that he resigned in disgust after a teenager he knew was denied payment for a transplant and died. He then wrote a brilliant book about his experience in the industry: Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans.

Companies offering such “primary” health insurance simply don’t exist (or are tiny) in every other developed country in the world but one. Mostly, where they do exist, they serve wealthier people looking for “extras” beyond the national system, like luxury hospital suites or air ambulances when overseas. (Switzerland is the outlier with exclusively private insurance, but it’s subsidized, mandatory, cheap, and non-profit.)

If Americans don’t know this, they intuit it.

In the 2020 election there were quite a few issues on statewide ballots around the country. Only three of them outpolled Joe Biden’s win, and expanding Medicaid to cover everybody was at the top of that list. (The other two were raising the minimum wage and legalizing pot.)

The last successful effort to provide government funded, single-payer healthcare insurance was when Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid (both single-payer systems) in the 1960s. It was a heck of an effort, but the health insurance industry was then a tiny fraction of its current size."

Part 1
The levels of greed displayed by the wealthy and their tools, the GOP, continue to eviscerate the middle class, destroy our social contract and create a dysfunctional society, where caring about each other is looked down upon. The wealthy in other countries are not as greedy, nor do they attempt to destroy democracy, their fellow citizens and "own" the government to the same extent as america's wealthy which are a cancer and parasites on our society.

Why Is the For-Profit Health Industry Like a Giant, Bloodsucking Tick? https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-is-the-for-profit-health-industry?

#CorporateGreed
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPLovesTheRich \
#GOPHatesWorkers
#TheRichHateAmericans

"Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives, and already have their sights set on forcing major cuts to “entitlements” like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

One of the promises McCarthy made to become speaker was to force a vote on dialing back 2023/2024 spending back to 2021 levels — and there’s been a 7% inflation increase in costs/expenses since then. In other words, they want massive cuts.

His Republican colleagues have already outlined the starting point for their demands, as reported by Yahoo News:

“The Republican Study Committee proposed a budget for fiscal 2023 that would gradually increase the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare, and change the Social Security benefit formula for people 54 and younger…”

In that, they’re going to have a hell of a fight on their hands, as Senator Bernie Sanders is taking over leadership of the Senate Health Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. He’s already promising “a lot of subpoenas” will be arriving at the offices of healthcare and big pharma CEOs.

Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens.

That’s it. We’re the only one left. Were the only country in the developed world where somebody getting sick can leave a family bankrupt, destitute, and homeless.

A half-million American families are wiped out every year so completely that they must lose everything and declare bankruptcy just because somebody got sick. The number of health-expense-related bankruptcies in all the other developed countries in the world combined is zero.

Yet the United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.

Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.

Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll (and don’t even cover all working people), whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10% and would cover every man, woman, and child in America.

How and why are Americans being played for such suckers?

We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.

And it’s not like we haven’t tried to remove that parasite.

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson all proposed and tried to bring a national healthcare system to the United States.

Here’s one example really worth watching where President Kennedy is pushing a single-payer system (as opposed to Britain’s “socialist” model; it’s 2 minutes and gets better as it goes along):

They all failed, and when I did a deep dive into the topic last year for my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare I found two major barriers to our removing that tick from our backs.

The early opposition, more than 100 years ago, to a national healthcare system came from southern white congressmen (they were all men) and senators who didn’t want even the possibility that Black people could benefit, health-wise, from white people’s tax dollars. (This thinking apparently still motivates many white Southern politicians.)..."

Part 2
The obscenely wealthy and greedy want to make as much money as possible by paying as little as possible for labor. The Fed and the GOP are their tools, doing whatever they can to help the greedy make more money while ignoring the plight of workers.

What to do about America's "labor shortage?" Easy. Pay people more. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-is-there-a-labor-shortage?

#TheyWantTheirSerfBack
#Greed
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#TheFedIs TheRichsTool

"Republicans and some corporate economists, meanwhile, are blaming the “labor shortage” on overly-generous jobless benefits. They say the way to get more people into jobs is to make their lives outside jobs less tolerable.

A recent “study” by Casey Mulligan and E.J. Antoni claims that “it pays not to work in Biden’s America,” because unemployment and Affordable Care Act benefits are so generous that “many businesses can’t get workers back on the job almost three years after COVID-19 hit these shores.”

Baloney. Apart from the non-working wealthy and their heirs, most unemployed people are hard up.

Pandemic benefits are over, and America’s social safety nets are in tatters — as they were at the start of the pandemic. Before the pandemic, fewer than 30 percent of unemployed Americans qualified for unemployment benefits, which last no longer than 6 months — the least generous of any other rich nation. Since then, we’ve done nothing to fix this broken system.

Affordable Care Act subsidies, meanwhile, allow low-income people to afford health insurance. Without these subsidies, many wouldn’t get the medical care they need and would face higher odds of getting seriously sick and hence unable to work.

Taken to its logical extreme, the corporate Republican argument might be correct. Eliminate all safety nets and at some point people without jobs will hurt so much they’ll have to take any available job, at any wage, whatever the job demands.

But do this, and we end up with an economy that’s even crueler than today’s.

The reason people aren’t working is that work doesn’t pay them enough, given declining wages and the increasing costs of childcare, eldercare, and transportation.

Both the Fed’s solution (slow the economy so employers can find the workers they need without raising wages) and the Republican corporate solution (slash safety nets so people are so desperate they have to take any job available) are cruel. They would impose huge burdens on many of the most vulnerable people in our society.

If we want more people to take jobs and we wish to live in a decent society, the answer is to pay people more."

Part 1
The obscenely wealthy and greedy want to make as much money as possible by paying as little as possible for labor. The Fed and the GOP are their tools, doing whatever they can to help the greedy make more money while ignoring the plight of workers.

What to do about America's "labor shortage?" Easy. Pay people more. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/why-is-there-a-labor-shortage?

#TheyWantTheirSerfBack
#Greed
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#TheFedIs TheRichsTool

"So often over the years I’ve found that when a public problem is wrongly described, the solutions posited turn out to be irrelevant or inhumane.

A current example: America’s so-called “labor shortage.”

Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, says the United States has a “structural labor shortage” that’s unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims there are over 10 million job openings in the U.S. for which employers can’t find workers.

Here’s the truth: There is no labor shortage.

There is, however, a shortage of jobs paying sufficient wages to attract workers to fill job openings.

(There’s also the demographic reality that the giant baby boom generation is reaching retirement age. But many retirees have returned to work after the pandemic because of inadequate savings or concerns about stock market volatility. If jobs paid more, presumably more boomers would return.)

For most Americans, real (inflation-adjusted) wages continue to drop. Wages have increased about 5 percent over the past year while prices have increased around 6.5 percent (according to today’s inflation report), a net loss for most workers of at least 1.5 percentage points.

Those price increases include the costs of childcare, eldercare, and transportation (cars, used cars, and gas), which are big expenses for many working people.

Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage continues to plummet. It hasn’t been raised in thirteen years – the longest period without a raise in its history. Adjusted for inflation, its real value is the lowest it's been in 66 years.

You don’t have to be a financial wizard to see why some workers might say the hell with it.

Economists offered similar warnings of a “labor shortage” after the financial crisis and recession of 2008-09. But when the economy strengthened and wages rose, the so-called “labor shortage” magically disappeared.

So what should be done about the difficulty employers are having finding workers? Simple. If employers want more workers, they should pay them more.

Jerome Powell and his colleague at the Fed don’t want to hear this. They’re aiming to deal with the “labor shortage” by slowing the economy so much that employers can find all the workers they need without raising wages.

Even after today’s encouraging news about inflation, central bankers believe they need to slow the job market and tamp down wage gains. “The biggest cost, by far, in [the service] sector is labor,” said Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, at his latest news conference in December. “And we do see a very, very strong labor market … where wages are very high.”

But slowing the economy will prevent millions of people of getting raises and cause millions more to lose their jobs — disproportionately low-wage workers, women, and people of color."

The GOP and their wealthy benefactor's orchestration of a partisan capture of the judiciary were always meant to be a means to control the government and get their way by doing an end-run around democracy.

"The Court has become a handmaiden to the corporate elites trying to increase their dominance over us."

Opinion | It's Time to Admit This Right-Wing U.S. Supreme Court Is a Corrupt, Autocratic Tribune | Common Dreams -- JIM HIGHTOWER https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/supreme-court-is-corrupt

#PartisanCaptureOfJudiciary
#SupremePartisans
#JudicialEndRunAroundDemocracy
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#WantTheirSerfsBack
#GOPHatesDemocracy

Question: How many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg? Answer: Four — calling the tail a leg doesn't make it one.

Likewise, calling a small group of partisan lawyers a "supreme" court doesn't make it one. There's nothing supreme about the six-pack of far-right-wing political activists who are presently soiling our people's ideals of justice by proclaiming their own antidemocratic biases to be the law of the land. On issues of economic fairness, women's rights, racial justice, corporate supremacy, environmental protection, theocratic rule and other fundamentals, these unelected, black-robed extremists are imposing an illegitimate elitist agenda on America that the people do not want and ultimately will not tolerate.

Indeed, the imperiousness of the six ruling judges has already caused the court's public approval rating to plummet, to a mere 38%, an historic low that ranks down there with former President Donald Trump, and threatens to go as low as Congress.

This has led to a flurry of officials attesting to the honesty and political impartiality of the reigning supremes. Unfortunately for the court, these ardent defenders were the six culprits themselves.

The "integrity of the judiciary is in my bones," pontificated Neil Gorsuch, who now stands accused of having lied to senators to win his lifetime appointment.

We don't have to accept rule by an illegitimate court.

"(We are not) a bunch of partisan hacks," wailed Amy Coney Barrett, a partisan extremist jammed onto the court in a partisan ploy by Trump in the last few hours of his presidency.

"Judges are not politicians," protested John Roberts, who became Chief Justice because he was a rabid political lawyer who pushed the Supreme Court in 2000 to reject the rights of voters and install George W. Bush as president.

As many of its own members privately admit, Congress has become a pay-to-play lawmaking casino — closed to commoners but offering full-service access to corporate powers.

But the Supreme Court is another government entity that's even more aloof from workaday people — and it has become a handmaiden to the corporate elites trying to increase their dominance over us. The six-member, right-wing majority on this secretive powerhouse now routinely vetoes efforts by workers, environmentalist, students, local officials, voters and all others who try to rein in corporate greed and abuses.

Appointed for lifetime terms, this autocratic tribune takes pride in being sealed off from democracy, even bragging that they make rulings without being influenced by special interests. But wait — in makeup and ideology, today's court majority is a special interest, for it consists of corporate and right-wing lawyers who've obtained their wealth and position by loyally serving corporate power. And far from now being isolated from moneyed elites, the judges regularly socialize with them and attend their closed-door political meetings.

There's even a special little club, called The Supreme Court Historical Society, that frequently reveals the cozy, symbiotic relationship that exists between today's judicial and corporate cliques. Such giants as Chevron, Goldman Sachs, AT&T and Home Depot pay millions of dollars to this clubby society, gaining notice by and the appreciation of the supremes. And, yes, these special interest gifts to the court are gratefully accepted, even when the corporations have active cases before the court, seeking favorable rulings from the very judges they're glad-handing at Society soirees.

Of course, the judges insist there's no conflict of interest, because this access to them is "open to all." Sure — all who can pay $25,000 and up to get inside! Yet the clueless judges wonder why their credibility is in the ditch. Remember, in America, The People are supreme! We don't have to accept rule by an illegitimate court. For reform, go to FixTheCourt.com.""

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."

Ginning up anger and fear is all the right has to offer the country because they're not about solutions that help anyone. They're about power and the ability to lavish tax cuts on, and abolish regulations for, their only real base; the wealthiest and corporations.

Opinion | What the right's war on 'wokeness' in the military is really about
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/09/conservatives-military-wokeness-masculinity-crisis/

#ConservativesFear
#ConservativeInsecurity
#GOPIsTheRichsTool
#GOPFauxOutrage
#GOPLIes4Power

"...Nevertheless, Republicans are convinced that the military is being rapidly destroyed from the inside by “wokeness,” a catchall term that refers to any development related to a social issue that conservatives don’t like.

The evidence they present for this alleged crisis is comically weak. But this isn’t about evidence, or the actual nature of warfighting in the 21st century. It’s about discomfort with modern society, deep insecurities about the changing nature of manhood, and an impulse to delegitimize institutions, even those conservatives used to revere.

“These Are The Top 7 Times The Military Went Woke In 2022,” trumpets the Daily Caller website, lamenting developments such as the removal of Confederate names from buildings. The Wall Street Journal editorial board breathlessly exposes “woke training” manuals in the Pentagon, while admitting it’s unclear who actually has to undergo this training.

Prominent conservatives regularly complain that the military is becoming “emasculated.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Chip Roy (R-Tex.) put out a “report” called “Woke Warfighters: How Political Ideology Is Weakening America’s Military.” A GOP lawmaker expresses his outrage about a West Point course on “white rage,” even though there’s no such course. The fantastical picture they’re trying to paint is one of a military that looks more like the gender studies department at Oberlin College than what it actually is — our enormous and sprawling machinery of war.

Now that Republicans control the House, they’ll be holding hearings on “wokeness” in the military, offering members a chance to emote angrily for the Fox News audience. “All this wokeness in the military, we are going to be aggressively trying to root that stuff out,” says Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.), who will likely chair the House Armed Services Committee.

Lacking from any of this bloviation is evidence that the various things conservatives call wokeness, from trying to prevent extremism in the ranks to designing body armor that fits female soldiers, have harmed the military’s mission in any way. Have there been attacks on the United States that weren’t stopped because soldiers were being forced to read books on critical race theory? What exactly can’t our military do that it used to be capable of, now that gay soldiers don’t have to stay in the closet? The critics can’t quite say. At least one lawmaker says parents of potential recruits are complaining to him about military wokeness. And where might they have learned about it? Fox News, perhaps?
...
But conservatives — especially those whose ideas about war come mostly from the movies — don’t like many of those changes. While they sometimes claim to oppose “politicization” of the military, what they actually want is for their cultural and political agenda to prevail there. They want the military to be a bulwark against progressive social change, where traditional gender norms are reinforced and reproduced.

When the wokeness panic is aimed at the military, it isn’t about the military at all. In a world where most men are unable to demonstrate that their upper-body strength justifies their superior social status, some are desperate to defend a physical hierarchy wherever it can be found. But if women can do nearly all military jobs just as well as men, then what’s left?

What’s left for many on the right is the feeling of being unmoored from any order that makes sense to them. Government can’t be trusted, the media are corrupt, corporations are against you, and the only appropriate response is rage. That feeling, Republicans also believe, is political gold.

That’s why leading figures on the right are so eager to tell everyone we’re suffering through a “crisis” of manhood. The answers to the supposed crisis range from the banal to the bizarre...The point is the problem, not the solution; it’s to make men more insecure and angry, so they’ll find reassurance in joining the culture war and voting Republican.

Unlike joining the actual military, service in the culture war is easy. You don’t have to suffer through boot camp, or follow orders you don’t like, or risk your life. All you have to do is stay mad."