by Thom Hartmann | May 24, 2021 - 6:15am
As we’re struggling to recover from Trump’s half-million unnecessary C***d deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the s******n was among Republicans in Congress around J****** 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe e******ns and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.
And they’re having considerable success.
About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s presidency.
In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It’s so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the “tyranny” of having to wear masks during a p******c, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the e******n, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.
This is no accident; it’s the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America’s richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar f****l f**l empire, a situation akin to the “heroic” brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged:
If you don’t have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.
If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don’t have a union, you make more money.
If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.
If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?
Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible “invisible hand” of the marketplace.
Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the “government is evil” bandwagon ever since.
And it’s largely worked, if the “trust in government” statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.
Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.
Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”
“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.
The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.
A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.
The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American r*******n-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”
There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.
They’ve funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the “deregulate, cut, denigrate” line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.
And over and over again, they’ve been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we’re seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony “audit” to further erode Americans’ faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it’s all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.
Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the C***d crisis a few months ago had this headline: “With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of V**ers Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans.” Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they’re opposing President Biden’s efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.
As this nation recovers from a deadly p******c that — unnecessarily — k**led more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing h**e groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let’s remember how this all came about.
And all for a few extra pieces of gold.
you long in BS theory- but short on facts or have s**t fir brain!!!!
Milosia2 wrote:
by Thom Hartmann | May 24, 2021 - 6:15am
As we’re struggling to recover from Trump’s half-million unnecessary C***d deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the s******n was among Republicans in Congress around J****** 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe e******ns and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.
And they’re having considerable success.
About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s presidency.
In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It’s so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the “tyranny” of having to wear masks during a p******c, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the e******n, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.
This is no accident; it’s the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America’s richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar f****l f**l empire, a situation akin to the “heroic” brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged:
If you don’t have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.
If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don’t have a union, you make more money.
If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.
If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?
Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible “invisible hand” of the marketplace.
Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the “government is evil” bandwagon ever since.
And it’s largely worked, if the “trust in government” statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.
Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.
Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”
“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.
The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.
A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.
The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American r*******n-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”
There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.
They’ve funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the “deregulate, cut, denigrate” line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.
And over and over again, they’ve been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we’re seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony “audit” to further erode Americans’ faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it’s all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.
Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the C***d crisis a few months ago had this headline: “With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of V**ers Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans.” Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they’re opposing President Biden’s efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.
As this nation recovers from a deadly p******c that — unnecessarily — k**led more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing h**e groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let’s remember how this all came about.
And all for a few extra pieces of gold.
by Thom Hartmann | May 24, 2021 - 6:15am br br As... (
show quote)
I see you learned to cut and paste. But it is all the same.
SOS NWM NWR
Milosia2 wrote:
by Thom Hartmann | May 24, 2021 - 6:15am
As we’re struggling to recover from Trump’s half-million unnecessary C***d deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the s******n was among Republicans in Congress around J****** 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe e******ns and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.
And they’re having considerable success.
About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s presidency.
In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It’s so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the “tyranny” of having to wear masks during a p******c, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the e******n, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.
This is no accident; it’s the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America’s richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar f****l f**l empire, a situation akin to the “heroic” brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged:
If you don’t have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.
If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don’t have a union, you make more money.
If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.
If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?
Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible “invisible hand” of the marketplace.
Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the “government is evil” bandwagon ever since.
And it’s largely worked, if the “trust in government” statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.
Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.
Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”
“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.
The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.
A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.
The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American r*******n-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”
There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.
They’ve funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the “deregulate, cut, denigrate” line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.
And over and over again, they’ve been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we’re seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony “audit” to further erode Americans’ faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it’s all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.
Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the C***d crisis a few months ago had this headline: “With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of V**ers Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans.” Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they’re opposing President Biden’s efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.
As this nation recovers from a deadly p******c that — unnecessarily — k**led more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing h**e groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let’s remember how this all came about.
And all for a few extra pieces of gold.
by Thom Hartmann | May 24, 2021 - 6:15am br br As... (
show quote)
Your posts are no longer worth reading or worthy of future response.
Milosia2 wrote:
Too much reality?
Thom only gets part of it. He’s no different than any other talking head in that respect
Liberty Tree wrote:
Your posts are no longer worth reading or worthy of future response.
Because they’re lies or because they’re true?
Hit a nerve , I knew it.
I guess it is true , that it is easier for a man to convince another of a lie,
Than it is for a man to convince another that he has been lied to .
ImLogicallyRight wrote:
I see you learned to cut and paste. But it is all the same.
SOS NWM NWR
You should’ve learned to read when you had the chance.
Rose42 wrote:
Thom only gets part of it. He’s no different than any other talking head in that respect
He must be a little bit different or you would be singing his praises.
He has written a Stack of Books.
How many have you written ?
Milosia2 wrote:
He must be a little bit different or you would be singing his praises.
He has written a Stack of Books.
How many have you written ?
So? So have other talking heads. Its pretty shallow to think one’s opinion matters more just because they’ve written books. Rush Limbaugh also wrote a number of books as have others.
Milosia2 wrote:
by Thom Hartmann | May 24, 2021 - 6:15am
As we’re struggling to recover from Trump’s half-million unnecessary C***d deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the s******n was among Republicans in Congress around J****** 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe e******ns and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.
And they’re having considerable success.
About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s presidency.
In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It’s so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the “tyranny” of having to wear masks during a p******c, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the e******n, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.
This is no accident; it’s the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America’s richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar f****l f**l empire, a situation akin to the “heroic” brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged:
If you don’t have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.
If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don’t have a union, you make more money.
If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.
If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?
Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible “invisible hand” of the marketplace.
Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the “government is evil” bandwagon ever since.
And it’s largely worked, if the “trust in government” statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.
Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.
Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”
“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.
The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.
A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.
The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American r*******n-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”
There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.
They’ve funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the “deregulate, cut, denigrate” line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.
And over and over again, they’ve been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we’re seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony “audit” to further erode Americans’ faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it’s all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.
Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the C***d crisis a few months ago had this headline: “With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of V**ers Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans.” Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they’re opposing President Biden’s efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.
As this nation recovers from a deadly p******c that — unnecessarily — k**led more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing h**e groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let’s remember how this all came about.
And all for a few extra pieces of gold.
by Thom Hartmann | May 24, 2021 - 6:15am br br As... (
show quote)
Money talks, everyone else is s**t.
Milosia2 wrote:
You should’ve learned to read when you had the chance.
I don't need to read bull schitte. And it that was a cut and paste from ewe, it is bull schitte.
Milosia2 wrote:
by Thom Hartmann | May 24, 2021 - 6:15am
As we’re struggling to recover from Trump’s half-million unnecessary C***d deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the s******n was among Republicans in Congress around J****** 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe e******ns and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.
And they’re having considerable success.
About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s presidency.
In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It’s so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the “tyranny” of having to wear masks during a p******c, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the e******n, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.
This is no accident; it’s the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America’s richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar f****l f**l empire, a situation akin to the “heroic” brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged:
If you don’t have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.
If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don’t have a union, you make more money.
If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.
If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you’ve made.
So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?
Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible “invisible hand” of the marketplace.
Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the “government is evil” bandwagon ever since.
And it’s largely worked, if the “trust in government” statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.
Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.
Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was “suffering under” in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, “A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included.”
“How can you handle that?” asked the host, incredulous.
The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.
A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.
The reporter went for a third try. “Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?” he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American r*******n-making.
The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.
He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”
There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.
They’ve funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the “deregulate, cut, denigrate” line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.
And over and over again, they’ve been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we’re seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony “audit” to further erode Americans’ faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it’s all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.
Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the C***d crisis a few months ago had this headline: “With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of V**ers Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans.” Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they’re opposing President Biden’s efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.
As this nation recovers from a deadly p******c that — unnecessarily — k**led more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing h**e groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let’s remember how this all came about.
And all for a few extra pieces of gold.
by Thom Hartmann | May 24, 2021 - 6:15am br br As... (
show quote)
"As we’re struggling to recover from Trump’s half-million unnecessary C***d deaths here in America"
You've got that right!! And Trump was right once more, it came from the lab in W***n, it had been genetically altered via g**n of f******n techniques and now, we are finding out that Chine knew about it even months before; all predicted and opined upon by Donald J Trump, and he was absolutely correct.
China committed and act of war, approved of by the l*****t democrats who called Trump a xenophobic r****t when he stopped incoming flights from China based upon his belief that China had allowed this thing to be loosed upon the world,
And you dim-witted l*****t Trump h**ers just could not admit that he was right and did everything you could do to stop him from fighting this thing the way he wanted. And despite all y'all's efforts to prevent Trump from fighting against this China v***s, Trump still managed to get v*****es out and into arms within a year.
You l*****t nimrods have no idea just how stupid y'all looked and still do trying to deny what is plainly right in front of your eyes.
Rose42 wrote:
Thom only gets part of it. He’s no different than any other talking head in that respect
By all means , please expand on that !
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