The right wants to force us all to be square pegs regardless of our actual shape! They don't like change and are always fantasizing about the good old days, which were never that good nor quite the way they remember them. They have and feel more fear and insecurity, so change and differences petrify them, or in this case rally them to arms. (That's why we call them conservatives and reactionaries.) They resist embracing the world as it is for that conflicts with how they think about it and that makes them very uncomfortable indeed. And they don't care who they hurt in their attempts to get their comfort back! Their comfort is more important to them than other people's lives and liberty!

Opinion | Target’s surrender to MAGA rage shows how anti-wokeness really works - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/25/target-pulls-lgbtq-clothing-right-wing-maga/

#TheRightIsSoInsecure
#ConservativesFightChange
#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityResponses

"...It would be overly simplistic to say that in these cases, corporations, executives and investors are simply ministering to majority opinion and that the right represents an angry minority. In the case of Bud Light, the resulting backlash reportedly cut into sales, meaning untold numbers of customers were unhappy with the decision. DeSantis was also reelected by a large majority of Floridians well after his war on Disney began.

Nevertheless, the right’s telling of the story is all wrong. In its reading, woke corporate elites are scheming in boardrooms to push the culture in a more progressive direction against the wishes of disempowered, silent culturally conservative majorities. That’s why right-wing figures have trained their fire on “woke corporations,” often insisting this justifies the use of state power against them.

In reality, corporations are acting in response to the broader culture. They are making self-interested decisions about how to profit off cultural shifts, and while such decisions do reinforce that evolution, they are a reaction to real, on-the-ground change.

The Bud Light gesture toward trans people was deliberately conceived as an effort to reach new customer constituencies. Disney’s opposition to “don’t say gay” was driven in part by discernible movements in public sentiment on LGBTQ issues as well as opinion among rank-and-file employees.

“One thing businesses are very good at is determining the public mood,” Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse told me. “They adjust themselves to that.”

Kruse sees parallels to the 1950s and 1960s, when big companies felt pushed by the civil rights movement’s groundswell for change. They found themselves caught between those forces and reactionaries who didn’t want them to evolve. Similarly, in the 1980s and 1990s, the religious right railed against gay-friendly corporate behavior. But corporations kept changing, reinforcing ongoing evolution.

“Corporations wind up deepening those trends,” Kruse said.

Kyle Edward Williams, author of a forthcoming book on political battles over corporations, notes that these calculations are often complicated. Big corporations want to appear in step with causes of the moment to give them a “personality” and a “moral conscience,” Williams said.

That has made them responsive to broad-based progressive social causes, such as the environmental and Black Lives Matter movements. All this has intensified as people increasingly identify consumer choices with political leanings, creating what Williams calls a corporate “arms race to show that they care about issues.”

This is what the right’s rearguard actions are really arrayed against. The goal is to extract pain from — and in some cases wield state power against — corporations to stop them from making profit-oriented decisions that reinforce cultural evolution already underway.

“That’s a new development within the right,” Williams told me, adding that the right is adopting ever more aggressive efforts to “protect and shore up conservative cultural interests.”

These campaigns are having successes here and there, as seen in Target’s case. But the changes that corporations such as Target are responding to are happening in the real world among ordinary people everywhere, far beyond “woke elite” boardroom suites. No amount of bullying and threats will make them disappear."

How disconcerting and intellectually lazy and dishonest! It would seem that Fox viewers don't tune in because they believe the lies they are being fed. They tune in because those lies make them feel good as they confirm their bias so they can enjoy owning the libs and being "right" even though neither are actually occurring. They are willing to help destroy our country and other people's lies just so they can feel smug and secure. That puts a whole new spin on deplorable and uncaring. Not all that different than their take on Christianity; all the feel-good benefits without all that pesky loving others and helping them. We shouldn't forget that they were encouraged to think and feel this slothful way by the obscenely wealthy and the religious leaders who both use them without any concern for their welfare.

Don’t expect Fox’s ratings dip to be permanent
Amanda Marcotte's Articles at Salon.com https://www.salon.com/writer/amanda_marcotte?

#GOPUsesRacists
#GOPUsesFundamentalists
#GreedKillsDemocracy
#InsecurityComplex

"It’s actually quite remarkable how half the Fox News viewership refused to tune into the network in the aftermath of Tucker Carlson’s firing. It’s further proof that their audience has been radicalized by social media, enough to punish the network in lockstep for dropping the loudest white nationalist on the channel. Fox viewers really do, as the Dominion lawsuit also demonstrated, tune in to hear their conspiracy theories and bigotries validated, not because they mistake it for the news.

Still, that’s why I think this “boycott” is temporary. Fox, with its New York offices and high production value, puts a high status gloss on right wing bullshit that is badly spelled and formatted on social media. Right wing media junkies can only deprive themselves of that affirmation for so long. They’ll come slithering back, eager for those bright studio lights to reassure them that their bizarro world views are legitimate."

The GOP couldn't care less about the financial, or any other kind of, wellbeing of the average American! They would gladly crash the economy if it got them more donations from their obscenely wealthy donors or if it hurt Biden's and Democrat's chances in the next election. They are the party of sociopaths, who don't care about the common good, but only about themselves and those who can benefit them.

The obscenely wealthy are equally as devoted only to themselves and their insatiable, pathological need to make ever more money! No amount would ever be enough, because their greed is like an addiction that can only be satisfied by constantly gaining more money. This is only part of what gives their greed away as a pathology that is fundamentally driven by fear and insecurity as they already clearly have plenty of money to take care of themselves. They just keep needing more; more money, more possessions, more winning and more losing for the rest of us.

Why the GOP May Actually Want a Second Great Depression https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-the-gop-may-actually-want-a-second?

#GreedKills
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#GreedIsAPathology
#InsecurityComplex
#GreedIsAnInsecurityResponse

"This is why Kevin McCarthy’s proposed legislation to raise the debt ceiling would strip $80 billion from the IRS: the morbidly rich tax cheats who own him (with the Supreme Court’s blessing in Citizens United) don’t want to get caught.

They want to hang onto the trillions they made during the last two crashes.

And, apparently, they’re happily anticipating the next crash that their boy McCarthy and their bought-off Republicans in Congress are working hard to bring to pass with their debt ceiling manipulations.

— Economic downturns not only cut wages and present buying opportunities for the wealthy and corporate America, they also give massive companies far more leverage when negotiating with vendors, who are typically desperate smaller businesses.

— They retain access to credit so they can leverage their buying opportunities in ways smaller companies and working class individuals can’t.

— And their power to fight unionization increases exponentially as workers scramble and compete for jobs that have become vanishingly rare.

But the average American can be forgiven for thinking that Republicans would be reluctant to crash the economy. Their lived experience is very different from that of Elon Musk (532% increase in wealth during the single year of 2020), Mark Zuckerberg (86% increase), or Jeff Bezos (65% increase).

During the Bush Crash, average income for the poorest 10% of Americans fell by a full 23%, making business (and billionaires) much more profitable while working people were skipping meals and cutting pills in half.

Thirteen years later, the Trump Crash threw 8,500,000 Americans out of work: according to the World Economic Forum, the adjusted unemployment rate hit 22.7 percent in 2020, higher than even during the Bush Crash, and it’s taken a full three years for working people to get back to where they started before Trump so badly mismanaged the pandemic.

Small business revenue collapsed by more than a fifth under Trump, new business formation cratered, and by July 2020 one-in-five American families were behind on their rent. The rate of hunger in America doubled at the same time the GOP sought to cut food stamps (SNAP) and Medicaid benefits.

The Bush and Trump crashes, in other words, did the work the morbidly rich have been demanding for years. Wages fell, unions struggled, corporate profits hit highs literally never before seen in America, and hedge funds bought up millions of distressed single-family homes to flip into high-priced rentals.

The stock market became absurdly cheap with both crashes, providing both the multimillionaire members of Congress and their billionaire backers with what used to be once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunities.

Additionally, throwing the country into a depression would almost guarantee Joe Biden loses the 2024 election. Presidents are rarely re-elected when the economy has gotten worse on their watch. Just ask Donald Trump, Jimmy Carter, or Jerry Ford.

So don’t be so sure Republicans in the House and Senate won’t drag America into default and a second Republican Great Depression if they have a chance.

They and their billionaire backers have almost nothing to lose and a fortune to gain."

Sounds like we are just some kind of cattle to the rich or maybe more like chattel, serfs or just assets to capitalize on. They don't care if they pay us starvation wages, move all the good jobs to other countries and reduce the U.S. to a 3rd world economy/society. They are too focused on all the money, possessions and toys they have. They don't care about us or our society.

People who care that much about money and that little about their fellow citizens and society should never be in a position to influence our government, let alone be able to buy it and politicians for what is a pittance compared to how much they make on the return of their donations/investments. Spend 10 million, get back 100 million in tax breaks or lowered regulations.

It can be difficult for us to see how sick and pathological this addiction to ever more money and power is because our society has been groomed to accept it as normal or even a sign of true success. It is sick/pathological though and driven by fear, insecurity, and an emotional immaturity and hollowness that makes them think that ever more money, possessions, power or what have you, will make them whole, safe, better, and looked up to.

There is nothing enviable about their malady nor is there a net positive contribution to our society from it. Rather, the majority of us are in worse financial shape than we were decades ago thanks to their behind-the-scenes machinations and yet they still press their flunkies in the GOP to take away even what little we have. It pains them to see us have employment, health, retirement or really any kind of security. It isn't just that they want it all, they also don't want us to have any of it. That is how pathological and unfit to steer our society they are.

Hmmm...but maybe we should allow them to control our society...what could it hurt?!

Okay, down from my soapbox for a minute to encourage you to read the very good and short article below.

Why The Rich Love To Crush Wages, Cut Pensions And So On To Fight Inflation – Ian Welsh https://www.ianwelsh.net/why-the-rich-love-to-crush-wages-cut-pensions-and-so-on-to-fight-inflation/

#InsecurityComplex
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#GreedKills
#GreedIsPathological

"The majority of price increases, of inflation, right now, are driven by price increases that are higher than increases in costs. Numbers I see tend to range from the mid sixties to the seventies.

They aren’t, then, driven primarily by wage increases.

The obvious way to solve this is to put in a surplus profit tax based on 2019 profit levels and forbid other ways of withdrawing excess profits like stock buy backs and option grants. Only after doing this would you consider trying to crush wages or cut pensions or other benefits.

That is, if your primary aim was to reduce inflation.

But it is undeniable that crushing wages will reduce inflation somewhat, even if it is far from the best way to do so and it has a great advantage.

It makes the rich even richer by reducing their wage costs!

On the other hand, an excess profits tax would make the rich not get richer nearly as fast.

You can see why governments controlled by the rich (yes they are, let us not be tedious) would prefer to crush wages as opposed to limit profits.

For the elite to support the sort of policies which would not crush wages and which would appear to reduce their profits, they would have to be like a good chunk (but not all) of the post-war elites. Having seen what happened when demand collapsed in the Great Depression, they knew they needed wages to rise and were thus willing to share and to pursue some policies which they didn’t like.

After all, while the fastest way to deal with inflation is an excess profits tax, the structural way is breaking up control of industries and re-regulating anything that even sniffs like an oligopoly or monopoly, plus slamming on huge estate taxes, wealth taxes and 90% top marginal tax rates, while putting a Glass-Steagall analogue back in place and re-nationalizing key parts of the economy.

Now, as it happens, the post-war economy was the best we’ve known since we were keeping records. High growth, reducing inequality but still plenty of profits. The rich had to live with only getting 20X or so as much as the middle class, though, and that’s just unacceptable to them.

Now never let it be said that the rich don’t learn: they do have a dim understanding of “demand collapse bad” and they have a solution, which they’ve been trying since 2008.

“What if we just print tons of money!?” Trillions and trillions of dollars were produced and are currently being produced out of thin air, with no increase in the underlying economy, and given to rich people to bail them out and even when they don’t need bailing out.

Who needs to actually grow customers and have customers having increased real incomes when you can just give yourself money?

This is why things will only improve when current elites lose power wholesale."

This mother would rather have her daughter commit suicide than be trans. What a sick piece of work!
Teasing apart the various sick layers--and I do mean sick like mentally ill or pathological--of the GOP can be challenging. It is such an unholy alliance!

At the top of this alliance are the obscenely wealthy who only want more money, possessions, and power and couldn't care less about anybody else. Then below them, steering and controlling much of the GOP (McConnel, McCarthy, MGT and their amoral ilk) are the servants/sycophants of the wealthy, trying to earn some of the obscenely wealthy's largesse and get some of the crumbs that fall from their ravenous maws. They are tasked with holding together and consolidating the lower levels of this unholy alliance; the true believers.

These are the fundamentalists/Christian nationalists, the racists/white supremacists, the nazis/fascists, the conspiracy theorists, etc.. None of these groups have enough members to win major elections. Yet if you can rope them all together, fund them and use them to support the policies and tax cuts of the obscenely wealthy, while throwing them breadcrumbs like the abolition of the separation of church and state, racist dog whistles, fascist, authoritarian policies, and some Qanon conspiracy-like theories, you can win elections while mostly just implementing the wealthy's wish lists.

But, over time, some of the true believers, run for office and get elected. They aren't true believers in the obscenely wealthy over all others cult, they believe in stupid things like abortion is evil, we need religion in schools, we need to persecute minorities and immigrants, and take away the rights and power of those on the left. It's kind of like a bug of the obscenely wealthy's alliance rather than a feature and thus you get people like this woman. She fervently believes being gay or trans is evil more than she worships the wealthy.

Together all these groups make up the GOP unholy alliance devised to give the wealthy control of a democratic country.

Montana GOP lawmaker's disturbing remarks about (not) saving her daughter's life https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/28/2166375/-Montana-GOP-lawmaker-just-said-she-preferred-her-daughter-commit-suicide-than-transition

#GOPUnholyAlliance
#GOPIsThePartyOfTheRich
#InsecurityComplex

"I need to introduce you to someone.

Republican “pro-life” Montana state Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, who sponsored an anti-trans bill in the Montana legislature, gave a speech that essentially said she’d rather her own daughter be dead than be trans.

In her disgusting rant, Crowe makes herself out to be the victim by equating her daughter’s mental health struggles to manipulation.

Just earlier this week we had to listen to the infamously awful Marjorie Taylor Greene telling Randi Weingarten that she’s not a real mother because her kids weren’t “biological.” Well, I’m pretty damn sure Crowe’s poor daughter would have loved the opportunity to be with an adopted loving mother instead of the one she was stuck with.

How do you argue with people this depraved?

California Rep. Ted Lieu weighed in by saying it’s not the government’s role to make personal decisions for families. Thank God, because who wants someone like this making your personal decisions?

This is the part that really struck me:

Someone once asked me, 'Wouldn't I just do anything to help save her?' And I really had to think and the answer was, 'No.'"

When I argue over gun safety after yet another school shooting that leaves dead children behind, I sometimes ask, “What if it was your child?” I see now that I might be wasting my time with this approach.

For some people, their hatred is more important than anything, even their child’s life. "

Conservatives and reactionaries are triggered by fear. They fear the unknown and the future and worship and cling to the past. They hate change and anything that is outside the "norm" turns them into reactionary, wilting, whining snowflakes. They also gravitate toward authoritarianism and paternalism. They have a narrow definition of their ingroup and rigidly define and maintain it, while discriminating against, hating and blaming all others as outgroups. This is what leads them to "hate" minorities and blame them for their worsening economic condition, while often embracing the obscenely wealthy as authoritarian father figures even though they are responsible for their economic free-fall. And, they don't want their racism or its long history to be talked about, taught to their children or used to change the privileges that they feel entitled to. That makes them feel uncomfortable and under assault from change as they more vigorously try to cling to the past. Gay and transexual people are more than they can handle, it isn't what they are used to and it threatens the dogma that their worship of the past and constancy requires. They don't want to hear about them; they want to sweep them out of sight, ban them, and blame them for the discomfort they feel in the face of change and when they think outside their safe, straight, "normal" past-worshipping box.

Fear and insecurity are what drives them and that is exactly what the GOP, right-wing media and wannabe autocrats use to control them like puppets, scare them into voting and poison them to any policies that they, or their obscenely wealthy masters, object to like raising taxes or taking away white privileges. This is one reason they routinely vote against their own self-interest. Fear and insecurity make them easy suckers for the Barnums of the political world and the rest of us pay the price.

Tennessee Education Bill Would Ban Discussion of Systemic Racism at Colleges - Truthout https://truthout.org/articles/tennessee-education-bill-would-ban-discussion-of-systemic-racism-at-colleges/

#GOPUsesFear
#GOPManipulatesTheirBase
#InsecurityComplex
#ConservativesFearOthers

"Shortly after Democratic state Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson were sworn back into office on Tuesday, the Tennessee legislature passed a bill that would limit discussions on race on college campuses across the state.

House Bill 1376, also known as the Tennessee Higher Education Freedom of Expression Act, would ban the discussion of 16 “divisive concepts,” including the idea that “the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist.” The bill — which Pearson has said will likely curtail conversation on issues like white privilege or unconscious biases in classrooms — is currently awaiting the governor’s signature after passing in a 68 to 26 vote..."

The kind of person that wants to be a dictator, is fundamentally dangerous to people and our planet. There is a mental illness that people who want to control everything or want to own ever more money or possessions suffer from. Their fears and insecurities endanger all of us and we must get better at keeping them out of power in advance!

Stormy Weather (with Mark Plotkin) - PREVAIL by Greg Olear https://gregolear.substack.com/p/stormy-weather-with-mark-plotkin

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityResponses
#GreedIsSick
#PowerHungerIsSick
#CulturalInsecurity
#RealityIsNotWhatWeThink

"And not a moment too soon. If democracy is on the precipice, so too is the continued habitability of earth.

“Climate change isn’t something where somebody’s flipped on or flipped off the light. It’s been happening for a while,” says Mark J. Plotkin, the ethnobotanist, frequent traveler to the Amazon, author, and my guest on the PREVAIL podcast. “But it’s where people live closer to the land that it effects them. And, you know, in an age where we’re concerned about refugees and the borders and stuff like this, if people who live off the land can’t live off the land, they end up somewhere else. And whether that’s climate change in Syria, whether that’s climate change in Haiti, you’re just creating more problems. . . . Ultimately, it impacts all of us.”

A second Trump term—in which FPOTUS would cater even more sycophantically to the oil and gas concerns championed by his whoremasters in Moscow and Riyadh—would be Game Over for the environment. Any hope of saving the planet from further climate disaster would evaporate the instant he put his puny hand back on Lincoln’s bible. He would increase fossil fuel production while building a wall on the Southern border to keep climate refugees out. Meanwhile, there will be even more “hundred-year” natural disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires—to go along with the crop failures, contaminated drinking water, and new plagues that unabated climate change will inevitably bring about.

In the Amazon, “the impact of climate change is already there. You’ve got rising temperatures, you’ve got diminished rainfall, you’ve got more rainfall in some areas, you’ve got increasing droughts in some areas, you’re got variations of seasonality,” Plotkin tells me. “And in the rainforest, both the animals and the plants and even the fungi, these species are not adapted to rapid changes in temperature like animals here.” Given that those species are incredibly useful to medical science—more wonder drugs have their origins in the Amazon than most people realize—this is a dreadful possibility.

“The idea that the only good rainforest is a dead rainforest,” Plotkin says, “or that we need to cut it all down to make cheap soy or chopsticks or something—I’m sorry, but the wonder drugs of tomorrow being turned into cheap soy and chopsticks, and the rivers being poisoned so people can have gold necklaces, strikes me as a pretty lame bargain.”

Almost two thirds of the Amazon rainforest is in Brazil. Former president Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Trump, favored chopping down the rainforests for short-term economic gain—for cheap soy and gold necklaces. Fortunately, Bolsonaro was voted out. His successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is a proponent of saving the rainforest. So too, Plotkin assures me, is the less-heralded Gustavo Petro of Colombia. All of humanity—heck, all life on earth—benefits from this. But one individual in the wrong place at the wrong time can expedite our collective doom.

In the United States, we know this firsthand. A million Americans died of covid-19 during Trump’s presidency; 300,000 of those deaths could have been prevented with better leadership and smarter public health policies.

The climate situation is dire. We can’t afford any more missteps. Trump’s serial abuse of women extends to Mother Earth.

“We like to think that our country—you know, the world’s oldest democracy, the wealthiest country, yadda yadda yadda—I mean, one person couldn’t change all that much in four years,” Plotkin says. “Now we know that they can.”"

Abortion, trans legislation, book banning: We are all fetuses now. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/03/we-are-all-fetuses-now.html

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityResponses
#ConservativesFearChange

"The tactic deployed to “protect” the unborn has now been deployed to deprive actual living, breathing, ambulating humans of agency, too.

It’s become axiomatic in our political discourse that one of the reasons the anti-abortion crowd became so powerfully persuasive in the decades after Roe is that claiming to speak for a fetus is rhetorically unassailable. If every fertilized egg is a human life, nobody can claim to understand its preferences and hopes and dreams, so substituting the voice of the movement is a simple matter: All fertilized eggs want to live and thrive, goes the theory...

This is why, as Barney Frank famously put it, “these people believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.” It’s why the quote from Dave Barnhart that went viral right before Roe was overturned is still so perfectly apt. As the pastor put it:

'The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn...'

The emptiness of this interest in life is also why so many anti-abortion politicians mouthed platitudes after Dobbs about their increased focus on poverty, food insecurity, and maternal and child health—and why very little of this has actually materialized.

But what many of us have missed is that the tactic of protecting the voiceless innocent unborn has now been deployed to deprive actual living, breathing, ambulating humans of moral agency as well. It’s the tactic being used to ban books, to silence teachers, to go after drag performances, to deny health care to families seeking to support trans kids. The notion that everyone must be protected from a scourge of immorality is, in some ways, old wine in a new bottle. But it is also a creeping form of illiberalism that ensures that for some GOP politicians, we all remain fetuses forever.
...
Getting from parental rights to book bans means deploying, again, the meaningless language of “grooming” and “Marxism” and “CRT” and the “sexualization of teenagers” that reduces both them, and the parents who choose to send them to public school, to fetuses, with no moral agency to think or speak for themselves.
...
The Texas Tribune reviewed more than two dozen anti-drag incidents, including protests and online harassment campaigns, that have occurred in the state since the beginning of Pride Month last June. Taken together, they show how a small but influential cadre of activists and extremist groups have fueled anti-drag panic by routinely characterizing all drag as inherently and nefariously sexual regardless of the content or audience. Those claims have then been used to justify harassment and legislation targeting the LGBTQ community as a whole, often under the guise of protecting kids.

Live human children, who have functioning human parents who either choose to take them to these events or do not, are being “protected” here, from being the ones to make decisions about their own lives. The opponents who insert themselves—into protected free-speech activity, by the way—have erased the moral will and decision-making choices of any player in this drama; have reduced them to nothing, zygotes in fluid. Their clarion call for parents’ rights now excludes parents. Who is being treated like a fetus now?
...
We are all fetuses now. American teens and, increasingly, their grown parents have become, as Barnhart so aptly put it, “the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe.”"

Great blog post, well worth reading. Explores especially how greed, and capitalism by extension, is a mental illness. We have become yoked to a capitalist nightmare that primarily serves the few while providing barely enough for the many to ensure we continue to labor for the wealthy who are as parasites upon us, as their greed is a parasite on them. No real winners!

Capitalism as Mental Illness, by Eric Anderson – Ian Welsh https://www.ianwelsh.net/capitalism-as-mental-illness/

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityResponses
#GreedKills
#GreedIsMentalIllness
#CapitalismIsMentalIllness
#FearIsInsecurity
#InsecurityResponsesAreSins

"It’s axiomatic that any system preying upon the vulnerabilities of the many, to profit the few, is both a moral and ethical atrocity. Capitalism embodies such a system. As originally conceived by Adam Smith “selfish interest” would theoretically extend “that universal opulence … to the lowest ranks of people.” But at some historical point his creation escaped. It turned malignant. Today, it serves only to increase the opulence of the opulent, while recruiting the rest of us to wage perpetual war against each other for survival. When, and why, did this occur? I’ll begin with a brief technical digression.

...Why do we it find so difficult to be humane?

In a word: fear. We are taught to fear the success of our fellows by teachers aiming a fire hose of capitalist propaganda at us from the moment of conception. We are taught young to fear our precarious positions in life. And thus, we fight interminably for ascendance to the promise of opulence, displayed on TV by the Jones’ we’ll never meet. And from fear arise those close cousins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. Oh, how well we’re taught young to fear falling behind those ubiquitous Jones’, ever parading their opulence before our eyes.

The result is predictable. Morally, our political leaders and captains of industry are insane with greed for wealth and power. How does someone need billions of dollars? And how can someone possessing billions of dollars look around the world, witness mass suffering, and do nothing about it while possessing the means to fix it? How can they use every tool at their disposal to crush the efforts of those who would try?

The answer is simple. Latent vulnerabilities, coupled with the stress of the hyper-competitive environment they were raised in, drive them insane. We all possess psychological vulnerabilities. We’re all incessantly exploited by well rehearsed behavioral tools. Algorithms, we call them now. And coupled with a conditioned creed to compete only for our own selfish interest, we’ve all grown sick in the mind.

Psychologically, we have been conditioned to accept an ethical system that treats atrocity as mundane, while simultaneously lionizing morally diseased monsters. We’re swaddled from birth in fear. We’re coddled on competition. And we age into insanity. This isn’t a portrait of a mentally healthy society. It’s a portrait of depravity on a mass scale — of capitalism as mental illness."

Part 4
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people.

Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"By 2020 almost two-thirds of all Americans would be wiped out by a single $400 unexpected expense, and between foreign imports and the gig economy most people entering the job market were looking at a poverty-grounded lifestyle.

Reaganomics succeeded in accomplishing Russell Kirk’s goal. The white middle class has largely become the white working poor, and the sense of safety their parents and grandparents enjoyed had evaporated.

As Alan Greenspan, in 1989, told the Wall Street Journal and I documented in my book Screwed: the Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, he believed his main job as Reagan’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve was to maintain a “necessary” minimum level of “worker insecurity.” (Republican former private equity executive and now Fed chair Jerome Powell has revived this ideology.

Meanwhile, for forty years Republicans from Schlafly to Reagan to Trump told white workers that the enemies who’d “stolen” their good union jobs were not the morbidly rich who’d shipped them overseas: the “bad guys” were liberals, women, Blacks, and Hispanics.

There is a debate about whether fascists are primarily motivated by economics, authoritarianism, or just pure racism. The answer is: “all of the above.”

But the Germans didn’t start looking for Jewish “others” until the Treaty of Versailles wrecked that country with its worst depression in its known history. Out of that grew Hitler, as John Kenneth Galbraith had correctly predicted would happen if the Treaty contained extreme economic punishments for Germany.

And out of Reaganism gutting the middle class grew a Trump wannabe dictatorship that lives on in demagogues like Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, and Rick Scott — all backed up by a massive network, often funded by the morbidly rich, of rightwing talk stations, podcasts, and online publications.

This isn’t experienced just at the level of the individual, of course, but far more deeply and powerfully as a corrosive poison that hollows out an entire society from within.

At the same time the white middle class was being gutted, the Black middle class that grew particularly fast after the Great Society reforms of the mid-1960s took a hit, too. Republicans then reached out to African Americans, arguing that their problems were all caused by Mexicans or Asians, while also telling Hispanics (now on hundreds of Spanish-language rightwing radio stations) that Black people are coming for their jobs.

“Divide and conquer” is as old as Julius Caesar.

Today they are funding new networks of Spanish-language “conservative” radio and television programming nationwide, telling mostly-Catholic Hispanics that Democrats are using abortion to produce a Latino genocide and that Democrats want to turn their children into drag queens.

Kirk’s original vision was to produce a more secure and stable America.

Like so many conservatives before him, from Edmund Burke (who opens Kirk’s book) to today’s columnists for major mainstream publications and talking heads on rightwing “News” stations and networks, he argued that when “those people” were simply held down, suppressed, and marginalized — when people knew their place and were kept in it — society would function smoothly.

Oligarchy is a good thing, they said, with white rich people (in constant need of trillions in government subsidies and tax cuts) running the show. They are promoting, essentially, an American version of fascism.

That it would build a middle class here in America instead of an authoritarian police state, as it has throughout history, was a fantasy then and its a fantasy now.

And it’s brought us the dystopian reality of a weakened economy (except for the rich), racial hatred, and now a full-blown fascist anti-democratic anti-republican movement grounded in a bizarre conspiracy cult led by demagogues like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ron DeSantis.

While Black history is under attack in schools across the nation by these same people, white Americans also need to learn their their own history and Reaganism’s role in it."

Part 3
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism.

Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"In the election of 1980 the Democrats were awash in union money, so didn’t much take advantage of Powell’s twin SCOTUS decisions, but the GOP leaped at the opportunity. Millions flowed from rich individuals and huge corporate behemoths — particularly the fossil fuel industry — into Republican coffers, sweeping Reagan into office that year.

Thus, Reagan set out to make sure the dystopia he and other wealthy white men had glimpsed during the “unrest” of the 1965–1979 era was never repeated:

Unions were crushed and formerly unionized jobs were aggressively offshored; individual states started passing “right to work for less” laws that devastated union membership; an entire union-busting industry was birthed that today makes over $2 billion a year terrifying workers.

Voting rights were circumscribed by Karl Rove’s 1980s invention called “caging” where postcards were sent into minority and union neighborhoods and when they weren’t returned the voters were purged from voter registration lists. The US Supreme Court legalized this just a few years ago in a case involving Governor Mike DeWine and Secretary of State John Husted in Ohio who were throwing hundreds of thousands of mostly Democratic voters off the rolls just before elections (as Ken Blackwell had done in Ohio to help Bush win the 2004 election).

Voter ID laws and other criminalizations of normal voting behavior were passed that excluded as many as 20 percent of potential Black and Hispanic voters, as well as college students and elderly Social Security voters, from casting ballots.

Massive antiabortion organizations were funded and mobilized to push back against the women’s rights movement, and white evangelical churches — which had been mostly pro-abortion rights prior to 1980 — cashed in on the movement and further empowered it, leading straight to packing the Supreme Court and the Dobbs decision.

Phyllis Schlafly led a national campaign urging women to stay out of the workplace and be obedient to their husbands, while also working against labor and abortion rights in the media and the courts.

Government programs to provide minorities with “bootstraps” (ranging from civil rights enforcement to affirmative action to basic food, education, and housing subsidies) were gutted. And the cultural demonization of college professors, queer people across the spectrum, and public intellectuals went mainstream.

In 1980 about two-thirds of white workers had either a union job or its equivalent (unions set local wage floors, generally, even in non-union shops) and most of what was consumed in America was manufactured here. Housing, college and healthcare were all affordable.

With just one single wage-earner, about two-thirds of Americans — most of them white— were living the American Dream, buying a home and car, taking an annual vacation, and building up pensions and savings for retirement. In many parts of the country Black Americans were also grabbing a share of the American dream, mostly through government jobs which, since the 60s, had forbidden racial discrimination in hiring.

It was so ubiquitous a lifestyle it was a background story line for shows from The Flintstones (1960–1966) to All In The Family (1971–1979) and The Simpsons (1989-today).

The 1960s show The Jetsons assumed that by the year 2020 a single wage earner just pushing a button a few times a day could support a family including fashion-obsessed teenagers and a charge-card-addicted wife.

Fast forward to the consequence of the first 30 years of Reaganomics: 2010 was the first year in three generations when fewer than 50 percent of Americans could call themselves middle class."

Part 2
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism.

Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"But when the birth-control pill was legalized in 1961 and the Vietnam War heated up a few years later, those marginalized groups Kirk had warned his wealthy white male followers about began to rise up in protest.

Kids were burning draft cards, women were burning bras, and Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a movement for racial justice that the white power structure blamed for American cities burning.

Meanwhile, the Arab Oil Embargos of the 1970s had lit the flame of inflation, and unionized workers were striking all over America for wage increases to keep up with the rising cost of living.

The white male power structure freaked out. They became convinced that they were seeing Kirk’s prophecy play out in real time on their television screens every night

Nixon demanded “law and order,” a euphemism for preventing students, women, striking union workers, or people of color from acquiring political and social power and the wealth that usually accompanies it.

He put into place his War on Drugs to, as his right-hand man John Ehrlichman famously noted, overtly criminalize being Black or an anti-war or pro-civil rights hippy.

“You understand what I’m saying?” Ehrlichman told reporter Dan Baum. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

“We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

This took us straight to 1971, when Lewis Powell wrote his infamous Memo noting that Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson had kicked off consumer and environmental movements that threatened to cost industry lots of money, and that the student, women’s, union, and civil rights movements were disruptive to society and had to be stopped.

The next year Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court and, particularly with the Buckley and Belotti decisions of 1976 and 1978 respectively, the Court put Powell’s doctrine into practice by legalizing political bribery by billionaires and corporations alike. (The Belotti decision legalizing corporate campaign contributions and dark-pool third-party bribery of politicians by industry was written by Powell himself!)"

Part 1
The GOP and conservatives have been conspiring for decades to enshrine white male privilege and rule by the obscenely wealthy into our country. To ensure nobody got secure enough or successful enough to challenge their power, they destroyed the middle class and the communities of non-white people. Nothing motivates people like feeling constantly insecure and financially threatened and that makes it easy to manipulate them by scapegoating others so they never see or blame who is really causing their problems. And that's how you birth fascism.

Why Would Anybody Embrace Fascism? - by Thom Hartmann https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-would-anybody-embrace-fascism

#InsecurityComplex
#InsecurityIsLackOfSafety
#GOPFascism
#GOPHatesDemocracy
#GOPInBedWithTheRich

"Male white supremacy is real and white suppression of minorities, particularly Black and Brown people along with gender minorities and women, absolutely permeates every aspect of our society, from business to culture to governance.

Without setting aside that reality, it’s useful to examine why so many white people, with their built-in white privilege, would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with wannabe dictators like Trump, Abbott, and DeSantis.

All over social media people are asking, “Why would anybody embrace fascism? Why would they be willing to overthrow a functioning democratic republic?”

And why now, instead of forty or more years ago?

The answer is simple: their perception of their own safety.

Safety is at the foundation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. If a person doesn’t feel safe, they’re not able to even think about other dimensions of life.

If you’re crossing a busy street and stuck in the middle as cars are whizzing by on both sides, you’re not thinking of your job opportunities or the next car you want to buy or even what’s for dinner or your love life. You just want to get safe!

And, increasingly, working class white men in America are feeling unsafe as America is conspicuously becoming browner. They’re told daily by an entire movement based in the GOP — which includes over 1500 right wing talk radio stations, rightwing television networks, and hundreds of publications — that straight white men have targets on their backs.

Adult Hispanics in Texas, for example, outnumbered whites for the first time this decade. It’s a new and shocking feeling for a group that’s been in power for over 400 years, and — as we’re seeing with DeSantis and Abbott’s cruel fraud against asylum seekers and all the love it’s getting on Fox “News” — producing a predictable backlash.

Racism, homophobia, and misogyny have gone from the margins, kept to oneself, and blown into the mainstream, being amplified and celebrated daily by Republican politicians busing and flying brown-skinned asylum seekers around the country, to open attacks on teaching Black history in schools, to rants on radio and podcasts.

In 1981 Ronald Reagan and the GOP began a 40-year project to disempower and gut the American middle class wage earners, which was then mostly made up of white men.

He wanted to take away their wealth and their safety.

There was an actual rationale for this, laid out by Russell Kirk in his 1951 book The Conservative Mind that I detail in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. Kirk argued that without clearly defined classes and power structures — essentially without the morbidly rich in complete control — society would devolve into chaos.

He and his followers essentially predicted in 1953 that if college students, women, working people, and people of color ever got even close to social and political power at the same level as wealthy white men, all hell would break loose.

(Keep in mind, this was at a time when racial segregation was legal and brutally enforced, the voting age was 21, campuses were almost entirely all-male, and women couldn’t open checking accounts or get credit cards without a husband or father’s signature.)

Throughout the 1950s, Kirk developed a small following; the most prominent of his proponents were William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater. Most Republicans, though, considered him a crackpot."

The pesticide industry, along with far too many other industries like oil, tobacco, chemicals, guns, technology and pharmaceuticals, and the wealthiest people in general, are threats to life on earth because of their sickening addiction to money/greed!! When will they ever have enough--it looks like never. They just want more and more money to salve on their fears, insecurities and inadequacies. There is nothing sane or healthy about their addiction to money and greed, or how they use and twist our politics and governments to satisfy their reprehensible needs. They waste their entire lives in the pursuit of money and power, as the expense of a meaningful life and relationships. They have shown time and again, they will do anything to get their "fix" even if it means killing people, animals or the entire ecosystem. We must recognize this sickness for what it is and see how dangerous it already has been and will continue to be. We must reign them in or perish at their demented, undisciplined addiction's hands! Being rich isn't a sign of success, and we must stop treating it as such. It is a sign of sickness that consumes these people's lives and endangers all of us.
#GreedKills
#GreedyRSick
#InsecuirtyResponsesKill
#InsecurityComplex

Pesticide Industry ‘Helped Write’ Disinformation Playbook Used by Big Oil and Big Tobacco, Report Reveals - DeSmog https://www.desmog.com/2022/12/09/pesticide-industry-science-denial-monsanto-glyphosate-cancer/

"The report, published by Friends of the Earth and nonprofit investigative organization U.S. Right to Know, uses the case study of Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) and its widely used glyphosate-based product Roundup to illustrate the pesticide industry’s deceptive tactics and communications strategies — which mirror those of the tobacco and fossil fuel industries.

“The pesticide industry is not just following in the footsteps of Big Tobacco and Big Oil, they co-wrote the playbook,” Stacy Malkan, lead report author and co-founder of U.S. Right to Know, said.

The pesticide industry used this PR strategy, which involves tactics like distorting science and disseminating misleading messaging through third party allies, to convince regulators and the public that its products were safe and necessary, the report explains.

“This case study provides an important window into how one company worked with many partners across the pesticide and processed food industries, academia, PR firms, and various front groups to sell the world on a toxic pesticide,” said author and advocate Anna Lappé, who contributed to the report. “These disinformation tactics are critical to understand because they have been used to push the entwined myths that we need pesticides to ‘feed the world’ and that they are totally safe.”

Despite mounting scientific evidence of their harms to human health and the environment, pesticides have proliferated, with global usage up by about 80 percent since 1990. The most widely used pesticide in the world is Roundup, which is alleged to have caused cancers. Litigation over this cancer link is ongoing, spurred by a 2015 finding from the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm classifying the chemical as a probable human carcinogen.

The report, released December 5, brings together internal corporate documents revealed through this litigation, as well as documents obtained through public records requests filed by U.S. Right to Know, to illuminate the extensive campaign by one of the world’s leading pesticide manufacturers — Monsanto, acquired by Bayer in 2018 — to disseminate disinformation and manipulate science regarding the health and environmental impacts of glyphosate.

These strategies have been “used by the pesticide industry for decades now and [their] impact on public health is enormous,” Nathan Donley, PhD, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told DeSmog via email.

Litigation concerning the health hazards of various pesticides, including glyphosate, stems from companies hijacking the regulatory process, he explained. “This can happen multiple ways, from pressuring decision makers at the EPA to producing enormous amounts of biased data that guide the actions of regulators. It’s been very effective unfortunately.”"