They have to keep the outrage going to keep the base riled up enough to overlook the fact that the GOP's policies only benefit the wealthy!

#GOPPartyOfTheRich

The right-wing outrage machine doesn’t even need Trump anymore
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/12/trump-republicans-right-wing-outrage/

"...But while the GOP might be moving on from Trump, it isn’t giving up on Trump’s technique of outrage-mongering. It’s simply finding new sources of fake aggrievement and artificial indignance to gin up its base.

In truth, Trump did not invent outrage politics. Long before he rode down his golden escalator to declare his candidacy in 2015, the right-wing media peddled a steady diet of contrived scandals to their viewers. They whined about mainstream media bias and the “establishment” in D.C. betraying voters.

Trump only perfected the art. He lied that President Barack Obama had bugged him. He smeared the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was a “witch hunt.” And, of course, he orchestrated a misinformation campaign to convince voters that the 2020 election was stolen, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

Still, Republicans do not need Trump to set up their own faux outrage. They have shown they have plenty capacity to invent scandals out of thin air. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, made a spectacle of supposed cases of voter fraud in his state, committed mostly by African Americans, though those cases keep crumbling when prosecutors bring them to court. And Kari Lake, the Republican who lost Arizona’s governor’s race, had no trouble claiming the election was robbed, suing state election officials on Friday. A judge found a pre-election lawsuit by Lake seeking to prohibit use of electronic voting machines “false, misleading, and unsupported.”

And there is no shortage of Republicans who can perform on cue. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) nearly brought himself to tears when discussing Democratic attempts to “destroy” Republican Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker and “deter young men and women of color from being Republicans.” Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) also brought out the waterworks while speaking on the House floor against the Respect for Marriage Act.

Whether it is critical race theory, Dr. Seuss books going out of circulation or Disney objecting to Florida’s “don’t say gay” law, the MAGA crowd’s sources of distress these days share some familiar features. For starters, they rarely have any connection to actual government policy. That’s either because the scandals don’t exist (critical race theory is nowhere to be found in the curriculum of K-12 schools) or because they have to do with actions made by private companies in which government has no business meddling.

Second, the outrages often stoke the feelings of resentment among White Christian nationalists who think their vision of America is facing an existential crisis. There are plenty of genuine outrages they could focus on (e.g., Russian war crimes, declining life expectancy, gun deaths), but those aren’t the right sort of outrages for the MAGA crowd. They need stories about White and Christian Americans being victims or Democrats hating America.

Third, these Republican outrages have virtually no impact on the lives of most Americans. Inflation? Climate change? Jobs? Oh, please. These don’t get the base’s blood boiling.

Finally, the MAGA outrages have, by design, no solution. There is nothing the government can do about “the war on Christmas” (even if one existed). And the federal government has no power to abolish critical race theory in schools (even if it were being taught). Precisely because their supporters’ outrage can never be assuaged and their made-up scandals can never be resolved, the stories dominating right-wing media remain endless fodder for pot-stirring.

Perhaps it’s progress that the GOP is drifting away from its obsession with Trump. The less our political debate focuses on him, the better for those interested in preserving democratic norms.

But so long as one of the two national parties feeds on irrationality, conspiracy theories, victimhood and paranoia, our politics won’t return to normal. We will still lack a system in which both sides compete to present problem-solving agendas to voters. And the maelstrom of anger and victimhood will continue, creating an atmosphere in which any means to an end is justified and political opponents are demonized.

In short, MAGA victimhood without Trump may be a new development. But it’s hardly an improvement."

Greedy people, and their corporations, kill people and destroy democracy to make a buck and have power! They don't care about anyone but themselves and they will gladly poison us, our environment/climate if they can get wealthy, make more money or have more power. They undermine our democracy so they can control it and get what they want. The havoc, death and misery they have created and continue to, is obscene as is the fact that they still aren't being held accountable for it. We cannot afford to indulge them and be blind to this any longer! Our future, our children's future and the planet's future all depend on us stepping up and cutting them off!!

Part2
How To Kill and Get Away With It https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/9/2140948/-How-To-Kill-and-Get-Away-With-It?pm_source=story_sidebar&pm_medium=web&pm_campaign=recommended
#GreedKills
#GreedDestroysDemocracy
#CapitalismIsGreed
#GreedIsAntiSocial
#GreedyHateDemocracy
#GOPPartyOfGreed
#GOPPartyOfTheRich

"...And this only scratches the surface. In just the past year, thousands of Americans have been killed and tens of thousands rendered homeless by climate change-driven weather that men in the fossil fuel industry knew fifty years ago would happen as the result of their selling their products. For money.

Odds are none will ever see the inside of a jail cell, and their companies will never be dissolved

There’s a lot of talk about “two standards of justice in America, one for the rich and another for everybody else.” But there’s a third standard of justice for corporations and their senior executives that commit crimes.

In the 1880s, conservatives on the Supreme Court bizarrely identified corporations as “persons” with human rights defined by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

In a 1978 decision written by Lewis “Memo” Powell, the Court ruled that when corporations purchase the loyalty of politicians, the money used for those purchases was to no longer be called “bribes” but, instead, is “free speech” protected by the First Amendment. The doctrine was radically expanded in 2010 with Citizens United.

Neither corporate immunities apply, however, to the small businesses that make up more than 99% of all corporations and LLCs in America. It’s notoriously easy to “pierce the corporate veil” of a business with revenues not measured in the millions and directly go after what is typically the company’s sole stockholder.

So the “corporate crime” problem is limited to the handful of large corporations and their senior executives who regularly make decisions that destroy Americans’ lives.

And our federal government doesn’t even keep a database of them and their crimes, even though they cost Americans as much as $800 billion a year and hundreds of thousands of lost lives.

Senators Dick Durbin and Richard Blumenthal along with Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon have introduced legislation that would require the Justice Department to build and maintain the same sort of database for criminal corporations as it already does with criminal humans.

That’s right: nobody in our government is keeping track of all this corporate crime. And when these members of Congress proposed it happen, not a single Republican joined their effort.

Our Assistant Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, estimates that as many as 20 percent of all the major corporate crime in this country is committed by corporate “repeat offenders.” But nobody’s sure: it could be twice that percentage, or it could be a smaller percentage and far more widespread than anybody realizes.

Human criminals kill around 23,000 Americans a year, according to the FBI (which only tracks and publishes statistics on crimes committed by human persons).

The coal and tobacco companies alone kill more Americans every year than they employ. (Coal employs 51,795 and kills an estimated 52,105 according to the US Dept. of Health and Human Services; Tobacco employs 124,342 and kills 522,000 according to the same data.)

Republicans spent much of last month’s election screaming from the rafters about crime in America.

Democrats should do the same as we head toward 2024, targeting the real killers and thieves in this nation. Average Americans, who absolutely realize how corrupt this system is, will appreciate it."

Greedy people, and their corporations, kill people and destroy democracy to make a buck and have power! They don't care about anyone but themselves and they will gladly poison us, our environment/climate if they can get wealthy, make more money or have more power. They undermine our democracy so they can control it and get what they want. The havoc, death and misery they have created and continue to, is obscene as is the fact that they still aren't being held accountable for it. We cannot afford to indulge them and be blind to this any longer! Our future, our children's future and the planet's future all depend on us stepping up and cutting them off!!

Part1
How To Kill and Get Away With It https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/9/2140948/-How-To-Kill-and-Get-Away-With-It?pm_source=story_sidebar&pm_medium=web&pm_campaign=recommended
#GreedKills
#GreedDestroysDemocracy
#CapitalismIsGreed
#GreedIsAntiSocial
#GreedyHateDemocracy
#GOPPartyOfGreed
#GOPPartyOfTheRich

"If you live in New York State and lie to that government about your income to reduce your taxes, you go to prison. If you’re criminally convicted of 17 counts of such lies — such tax fraud — you could spend a long time in prison.

But The Trump Organization, a New York corporation that was just convicted of 17 criminal counts of tax fraud, not only won’t “go to jail” but also won’t even be dissolved for its crimes.

Instead, it’ll pay a maximum $1.6 million fine that represents less money than just one of Trump’s several-criminally-implicated employees and relatives made off with by the company committing their fraud for the past 15 years.

When the senior executives of California’s private for-profit power utility PG&E made the very intentional decision to move cash into their own pockets through bonuses and dividends instead of making their power lines resilient enough to withstand severe winds, they also made the decision to let people die.

And, sure enough, PG&E pleaded guilty to those 84 killings for the 2018 Camp Fire caused by the failure of those very high-tension lines. The judge forced the CEO, Bill Johnson, to come to court to enter his company’s guilty plea to those deaths and say, “Guilty, your honor” 84 times. But neither he nor any executives at the company spent a single day in jail. Instead, the multi-billion-dollar company paid $3.5 million in fines.

Just two years earlier, PG&E had been convicted of causing the death of 8 other people through poor maintenance on a gas pipeline; they were still “on probation” for those deaths when they chose not to maintain 100-year-old high-tension towers leading to the Camp Fire.

Bizarrely, America has different standards for human criminals than corporate criminals, even though corporations kill around 40 times more Americans every year than do more mundane “normal” crooks.

Alfred Ruf poisoned his wife as part of a scheme to get rich off her life insurance. So did Dr. Gregory “Brent” Dennis, who was looking at a $2 million payout. Joshua Hunsucker poisoned his wife for a mere $250K in life insurance money, $80,000 of which he used to buy a boat. David L. Pettis poisoned his wife for $150,000.

I don’t know the names of the men who poisoned and killed my father and my brother Stan, but I know where they worked and why they did it: just like Ruf, Dennis, Hunsucker and Pettis, they intentionally and knowingly took actions they believed would result in death when they sold asbestos to my dad’s employer and got my brother addicted to tobacco.

The asbestos industry knew as early as the 1890s, and got definite confirmation in the 1940s, that their product caused mesothelioma, the particularly brutal lung cancer that killed my father.

Even today, their executives are trying to avoid responsibility for it: Johnson & Johnson was playing bankruptcy games to avoid paying for cancers caused by their asbestos-laced talcum powder, and not a single executive is even slightly worried about going to jail for all those dead women.

Same deal with the tobacco industry whose top CEOs lied to the faces of members of Congress in 1994 at the same time their industry has been killing over 500,000 Americans a year every year of my lifetime.

Like those four wife-killers, like the Trump Organization, like PG&E, they all did it for the money. But the CEOs and senior executives of America’s deadliest corporations made and get to keep a hell of a lot more money than Ruf, Dennis, Hunsucker and Pettis could ever imagine.

Ruf, Dennis, Hunsucker and Pettis are all in prison. The decision-makers who today are still promoting tobacco, using bankruptcy laws to avoid paying for asbestos deaths, and, like Trump, running companies that engage in tax fraud are living the high life in their mansions, private jets, and yachts..."