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."

Why the GOP, Fox-So-Called "News" & Rightwing Hate Radio Use Fear as Their Primary Tool https://hartmannreport.com/p/why-the-gop-fox-so-called-news-and

#GOPUsesFear
#InsecurityResponses

"...Most Democratic political messaging and ads are upbeat and talk about what politicians and the party have done and hope to do for working class and poor Americans. Most Republican ads, on the other hand, are dark, ominous, and point to danger, death, and destruction.
...
Our most primal emotion is fear.
...
This is why fear is so powerful: it’s at the core of our survival instincts
...
Because fear was primary at our birth, when we experience it as adults it tends to throw us back to our infancy. It’s why torture victims usually sob uncontrollably; why George Floyd and Tyree Nichols both called out for their mothers as police officers brutally murdered them
...
Fear, in other words, infantilizes us. It takes us back to a time before knowledge, before logic, before we felt power and agency as an adult. Fear sweeps aside a lifetime of learning and maturing and reduces us, emotionally, to infancy.

Which is precisely why Republicans and GOP-aligned media like Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio use fear as their primary tool to capture and motivate voters. Turn on rightwing media at any random time and you’ll get a fiery blast of rhetoric and imagery specifically designed to induce fear, thus producing infantilization.

...when Republicans can throw them into that state of fear, part two of the classic authoritarian playbook kicks in: offer a powerful-seeming parental figure (almost always male) who can reassure frightened Republicans that he’ll take care of them
...
Donald Trump has been playing this game ever since he came down the escalator in 2015 ranting about dark-skinned “rapists and murderers pouring across our border” from Mexico.
...
Nixon did it when he declared his racist “war on drugs.” Reagan did it when he referred to Black people as “monkeys” and “cannibals” who are “uncomfortable wearing shoes.” ...George W. Bush did it to justify two illegal wars
...
If you can scare people badly enough, you can get them to go along with almost anything sold to them as providing safety and security.

It’s why every fascist movement in history starts out by dehumanizing its victims, then characterizing them as an existential threat. Whether it was Hitler’s characterization of Jews, or DeSantis’ portrayal of trans people and drag queens as “groomers and predators,” the script is always the same.
...
As the brilliant Amanda Marcotte noted for Salon:

“The last thing MAGA stands for, in fact, is making America great, much less ‘great again.’ These are people caught up in a dark fantasy that they live in a zombie movie.”

She goes so far as to speculate that Republicans refuse to do anything about gun violence because mass- and school-shootings increase the fear of Americans, and Republicans live on fear the way vampires live on blood .
...
Republicans instead want you to believe that drag queens, public school teachers, and trans people are “groomers” and “molesters.”

You won’t hear a peep out of them about the steady stream of fundamentalist and Catholic pastors and priests (and Republican politicians) arrested for grooming and molesting: this is about creating fear and then redirecting that fear against people who are the least likely to be able to fight back.
...
Once white voters are reduced to that child-like state, with every fear assuaged by performative anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-Black history, anti-drag, and anti-abortion laws, it’s an easy step to telling them, as Trump did repeatedly:

“Only we can help you. Only we can ‘save’ America and bring her back to the uncomplicated white supremacy glory days of the 1950s.”

This strategy, employed by dictators and autocrats, is as ancient as history. Caligula did it, as did Nero. Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, and Orbán achieved and exercised power using fear.

And now the GOP has adopted fear as their first and foremost electoral strategy, knowing it’s so powerful that both optimism and fact-checking almost always fail against it.

Ironically, in their overreach, Republican policies are now inspiring so much reactive fear in Democratic voters — particularly among women, students, the queer community, and people of color — that it may end up propelling millions of new progressive voters to the polls."

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.”"

Republicans being hypocrites?! How could that be?! They just want to have their way, regardless of whether it is consistent with what they say or do. They don't want the truth, consistency or what is right for all of us, they just want to get their way, and especially whatever their obscenely wealthy donors want!

The obscenely wealthy aren't interested in what is good for the country or other people, they want handouts, and they don't want anyone else getting them. Sounds like some spoiled and immature children, doesn't it? That's because people like that, who sell their lives and integrity for greed and money, aren't mature and emotionally sound. They are even more insecure or less able to cope with their insecurity than the rest of us.

As a response to this insecurity/fear, they slather themselves with money, possessions, power, esteem and apparently their own personal public servants, all to reassure themselves how good they are and that they're better than everyone else, and to hell with the rest of us. They don't share, they want everything for themselves and see any benefits for anyone else as taking away from what they so desperately "need" for themselves.

And, their "owned" politicians are in the same boat. They aren't taking those donations and job offers after office because they are noble. They, just like their donors, want money, power, etc., because that makes them feel more secure. What great role models for upcoming generations, not! And people like that should never be in positions of power where they can sell out the rest of us.

Republican Who Rails Against Student Loan “Bailout” Got $1.5M of Loans Forgiven https://truthout.org/articles/republican-who-rails-against-student-loan-bailout-got-1-5m-of-loans-forgiven/

#GreedKills
#GOPGreed
#InsecurityResponses
#GreedIsAntiSocial

"On Thursday, Republican Rep. Burgess Owens (Utah), who has declared personal bankruptcy five times and had $1.5 million of his debt discharged, held a hearing aimed at attacking President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan to forgive up to $20,000 of debt for borrowers.

In the hearing by the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development, Owens railed against the concept of student debt forgiveness, saying that it was unfair for those who pursued higher education to seek forgiveness and place the burden of their loans on the public — an argument that debt forgiveness activists have long disputed.

“Many people in this room probably have student loans. However, the blanket bailout that turns loans into target grants and saddles future generations with someone else’s debt is not a solution,” Owens said in his opening statement.

He railed against individuals for taking on loans that created “short-sighted, self-centered and intergenerational debt,” and complained that the education that borrowers received is “low quality,” perpetuating a thread of right-wingers attacking higher education for spurious reasons while disregarding the fact that the vast majority of jobs now require a college degree.

However, debt activists are pointing out that Owens is a raging hypocrite. During his first campaign for office in 2020, it was revealed that Owens filed for personal bankruptcy five times between the 1990s and 2000s.
...
However, as The Salt Lake Tribune uncovered, records show that Owens filed for Chapter 7 in 2005 for $1.7 million in debt...meaning, essentially, that Owens had $1.5 million in debts discharged by courts, per the Salt Lake Tribune.
...
The bankruptcies weren’t Owens’s only financial trouble during his campaign. During his campaign, it was found that Owens had accepted at least $135,500 in contributions that were over legal limits, which amounted to about 40 percent of the funding that his campaign had on hand during the last stretch of the contested run. Later, he was handed a fee by the Federal Election Commission for failing to report $34,000 in contributions to his campaign.

Debt activists also pointed out the hypocrisy of other Republicans on the subcommittee. ...tuition at the University of Miami...is now three times as expensive as it was when Owens graduated. The federal minimum wage then was higher than it is now, adjusted for inflation.

For Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina), the chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, tuition at (UNC) Chapel Hill, was $310 when she graduated in 1968, or about $2,700 in today’s dollars. Now, tuition there is about $7,000, or an effective increase of 258 percent. Minimum wage then was $14 in today’s dollars — a large contrast to the current minimum wage of $7.25 federally..."

What connects Trump’s likely arrest with the bank bailouts? https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-connects-trumps-call-to-protest

#InsecurityResponses
#GreedIsAnInsecurityResponse
#PowerHungerIsAnInsecurityResponse
#FearNInsecurityThreatenDemocracy
#Socialism4MeNotThee
#TheFedIsTheToolOfTheRich

"...In the midterm elections of 2022, Thiel donated $15 million to the Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of JD Vance, who alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
...
What connects Thiel to the bank bailouts?

Days before Silicon Valley Bank failed, Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund, advised clients to pull their deposits out. This contributed to the run on the bank.

Some $50 million of Thiel’s own money was still stuck in the bank. Then, guess what? Thiel and other rich depositors got bailed out by the Fed.

Charges of hypocrisy have been leveled at Thiel and other wealthy depositors who claim to be libertarians but were rescued by the government.

There was nothing hypocritical about it. Thiel and others like him aren’t really opposed to government, per se. They’re opposed to democracy. They prefer an oligarchy — a government controlled by super-wealthy people like themselves.

Thiel is part of the anti-democracy movement, of which Trump is the informal leader.

Their antipathy to democracy comes from the same fear that the extremely wealthy have always harbored about democracy — that a majority could vote to take away their money.
...
Thiel and his ilk see in Trump an authoritarian strongman who won’t allow a majority to take away their wealth.
...
They also support the Fed. Like most of the world’s central banks, the Fed is removed from democratic accountability, out of fear that financial markets otherwise won’t trust them to do unpopular things like bailing out banks or controlling inflation by slowing economies and causing millions to lose their jobs. The Fed is run largely by bankers. You might say it’s part of America’s oligarchy.

A few years ago, Thiel wrote that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Presumably he was referring to the freedom of oligarchs like himself to be unconstrained by taxes and regulations. In this narrow sense, he’s correct: Oligarchy is incompatible with democracy. Nor is oligarchy compatible with the freedom of the rest of us.

Thiel and others like him want to return to an era when American oligarchs had freer reign. In that same essay, Thiel wrote:

'The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.'

But if “capitalist democracy” has become an oxymoron, it’s not due to excessive public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are undermining democracy with giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates.

I’m old enough to remember a former generation of wealthy Republicans who backed candidates like Barry Goldwater. They called themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to conserve American institutions. But Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve anything — at least anything that came after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote (except for the Federal Reserve’s bailouts for the rich and its ability to draft average workers into fighting inflation).

The 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when the richest Americans siphoned off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of America had to go deep into debt to maintain their standard of living and sustain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced. When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.

It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed."

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."

Democracy cultivates the collective wisdom of all of us to steer us away from disaster and towards a sustainable future. That is, unless it has been hijacked by the selfish/wealthy/greedy and power-hungry. They mislead us with false information--Fox News and countless other disinformation campaigns--and corrupt our government and democracy through bribery and appealing to our basest and most fear-based instincts. Sounds like the GOP to me.

Part 2
The Danger of the Rich & Powerful Man-Bubble

https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-danger-of-the-rich-and-powerful?publication_id=302288&post_id=88639994&isFreemail=true
#CitizensUnited
#TogetherWeStand
#GOPDividesUs
#InsecurityResponses

"...When democracies begin to drift away from this fundamental principle, and those who have accumulated wealth and the political power typically associated with it acquire the ability to influence or even control the rule-making process, democracy begins to fail.

When this process becomes advanced, democracies typically morph first into oligarchies (where we largely are now) and then dictatorships (where Trump just proposed to take us).

When the US Supreme Court ruled in a series of decisions between 1976 and 2013 that it is mere “free speech“ protected by the First Amendment when wealthy people or corporations nakedly buy and bribe political figures to alter the rules in a way that benefits themselves, they placed a cancer at the heart of our democracy that has now significantly metastasized.

The great challenge of our day is going to be to excise that disease, to wrest control of our economic and political systems away from the small group of billionaires and politically active corporations that have seized it.

These men (mostly) and CEOs have, like Trump and Putin, come to “believe their own BS,” as the old expression goes. It blinds them to the larger impact of their political machinations on all of society, all of humanity, all life on planet Earth.

Instead, they welcome the corruption the Supreme Court put into place with Citizens United, which gives the tiny slice of morbidly rich people such massive power. They welcome it because they think — being “secret geniuses,” as Brian Klaas wrote about last week — that they’re deserving of it and uniquely know best how to use it.

To the extent that the United States is still a democracy — and lacking a legislature or court system willing to challenge America’s oligarchs — the only option left to Americans to save our nation and the world from these “secret geniuses” is to soundly reject them and their bought-off shills at the ballot box.

It won’t be easy, but if this is not accomplished soon our current marginally democratic oligarchy will become a dictatorship with a thin façade of democracy, much like modern-day Hungary or Russia.

And that’s not just a threat to Americans: it’s a threat to all life on Earth."

Democracy cultivates the collective wisdom of all of us to steer us away from disaster and towards a sustainable future. That is, unless it has been hijacked by the selfish/wealthy/greedy and power-hungry. They mislead us with false information--Fox News and countless other disinformation campaigns--and corrupt our government and democracy through bribery and appealing to our basest and most fear-based instincts. Sounds like the GOP to me.

Part 1
The Danger of the Rich & Powerful Man-Bubble

https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-danger-of-the-rich-and-powerful?publication_id=302288&post_id=88639994&isFreemail=true
#CitizensUnited
#TogetherWeStand
#GOPDividesUs
#InsecurityResponses

It was a mistake a flock of geese wouldn’t make. It was a mistake nature and evolution have designed against in all animal life. But a small group of humans keep making it over and over again, and our Supreme Court has made the situation far, far worse.
...
Trump has now made the same mistake Napoleon made, the same mistake Hitler made, the same mistake Putin made when he invaded Ukraine. It’s the mistake the business press says Elon Musk is making, as did Sam Bankman-Fried, and Mike Lindell.

It’s the mistake Xi Jinping is making right now governing China.

All these rich and powerful men had/have the same thing in common: they believed their brilliance or success in one area meant they were brilliant and would be successful in all endeavors.

As a result of this false belief, each surrounded themselves with yes-men and lived in a bubble, disconnecting them from their business or political constituents…leading to bad, poorly informed decision-making processes.

In other words, each rejected democracy.

A threat like this to democracy is also a threat to all life on Earth. Because, at its simplest, democracy can be described as the ultimate human survival behavior.
...
A massive body of scientific literature, most accumulated over the past century, shows that group decision-making is almost always superior to decision-making by charismatic individuals or small groups of people who’ve managed to ringfence resources that give them great wealth and power over others.
...
Democracies are most robust when the people lead politicians who are responsive to popular opinion; they’re most fragile when politicians can ignore public opinion because they’ve seized the power to choose their voters and dictate the terms of governance.
...
Thus, we find that democracy — a system of decision making and rulemaking that most efficiently encompasses the collective wisdom of the group — is a survival system every bit as important as technology, from stone tools to weapons of war to rocket ships.
...
This use of voting democracy is so universal that it’s not limited to human beings.

In the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph Jefferson wrote that “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” compelled America’s Founders to reject British oligarchy and embrace democracy.
...
His deist friends like George Washington, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Ben Franklin knew what he meant: nature and god were the same thing, interpenetrating each other.

And they operate by certain rules of nature that are as universal to humans as they are to all other animals on earth.

But was he right? Is nature actually democratic?
...
But it turns out that there’s a system for voting among animals, from honeybees to primates, that we’ve just never noticed because we weren’t looking for it.
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Conradt and Roper discovered that when a single leader (what they call a despot) or a small group of leaders (the animal equivalent of an oligarchy) make the choices, the swings into extremes of behavior tend to be greater and more dangerous to the long-term survival of the group.

Because in a despotic model the overall needs of the entire group are measured only through the lens of the leader’s needs, wrong decisions would be made often enough to put the survival of the group at risk.

With democratic decision-making, however, the overall knowledge and wisdom of the entire group, as well as the needs of the entire group, come into play. The outcome is less likely to harm anybody, and the group’s probability of survival is enhanced.
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“In the case of real red deer,” James Randerson noted, “the animals do indeed vote with their feet by standing up. Likewise, with groups of African buffalo, individuals decide where to go by pointing in their preferred direction. The group takes the average and heads that way.”

This explains in part the “flock,” “swarm” and “school” nature of birds, gnats, and fish. With each wingbeat or fin motion, each member is “voting” for the direction the flock, swarm or school should move; when the 51% threshold is hit, the entire group moves as if telepathically synchronized.
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Democracy, it turns out, is the norm in the animal kingdom, for the simple reason that it confers the greatest likelihood the group will survive and prosper."