Trump And The Death Of Honest Information

George Monbiot from The Guardian discusses the ugly effect Trump might have on a trusting public. Trump’s closest advisors aren’t simply dishonest, they are leaders in the corporate disinformation system. Welcome to an era of propaganda enforced with government muscle.

Read it in the Guardian

This weekend’s shoot up in a family pizza restaurant in DC by a Trump vigilante shows how the Trump posse turns their bogus news stream into violent action

This BuzzFeed article demonstrates how the false news industry that helped elect Trump may also deliver an armed and gullible posse to wreak havoc where you live

An article published in The Nation 25 years ago predicted the advent of “post-truth” America

Read it in The Nation

Trump surrogate on NPR: “There’s no such thing as facts.”

The Atlantic explains what Trump's post-truth machine signifies for America

The same NPR interview discussed at Raw Story

Truth is becoming a scarce commodity in the Trump era.

CNN reports on how Trump plans to narrow access to the internet. Narrower access = more power to the dear leader.

Read it at CNN-Money

This Republican dislike of truth and facts is not new. It’s central to the Republican brand. Facts give them problems.

The New York Times reported on this same "we create our own reality" mindset in the George W. Bush administration. That false news strategy marched us into an unnecessary and catastrophic war.

Sarah Palin says that God intervened in this election. (She may be referring to her close neighbor Vladimir Putin)

The Independent, published in London, suspects Palin is a signal that America is losing its mind.

The editor of the Washington Post (Marty Baron, the hero who led the Boston Globe’s dogged exposure of priest child abuse) has some advice for journalists as we enter a new world where it’s dangerous to speak truth to power.

Read about Marty Baron's warning and advice at Vanity Fair

How Senator Rubio And The Republicans In Congress Rigged Your Healthcare Premiums To Go Up

"RISK CORRIDOR": THE REAL REASON OBAMA-CARE PREMIUMS ARE GOING UP IN 2017 -- THAT NO ONE IS TELLING YOU ABOUT

Hot off Wednesday's Thom Hartmann Show:

This is why the insurance companies participating in the Affordable Care Act are raising their premiums next year. As we know, the ACA ended the practice of denying coverage to people with previous conditions (which was causing people who were very ill to go without health care, and others to die). Even though the insurance companies would profit in long-term from overall increased number of enrollees, they screamed because of the short-term losses due to mandatory coverage of people who were already chronically ill. This period of short-term loss due to the addition of high-risk enrollees was dubbed "the risk corridor."

So to sweeten the deal, Obama then added extra subsidies for any losses incurred in the risk corridor. (Poor insurance companies! After all, CEO Helmsley must not be allowed to lose 1 cent of the one billion dollars+ he takes yearly in personal income from United Health Care.) The risk corridor subsidies were of course dependent on Congress passing budget bills that provided the funds for them.

This year, Senator Marco Rubio stripped out funds for the risk corridor subsidies, not as part of a budget bill (which is the honest way to do it), but as a rider to an unrelated bill, which Obama was compelled to sign, for whatever reasons pertinent to the purposes of the actual bill. As a result, the strip-out, and who did it, never got covered in the news. (Which is just how the Republicans wanted it.) And, as a result, the insurance companies will not get the subsidies that provide their short-term profits next year. Instead of "manning up," as the Conservatives like to say, and taking the losses next year in stride (which is what corporations used to do, and found acceptable as part of doing business, when we baby-boomers were kids), and disregarding that these losses will eventually be made up by long-term increased enrollments, the insurance companies are raising their premiums. A lot. Who knows... They may even end up making more money than they would have with the government subsidies.

Meanwhile, the enrollees are screaming bloody murder, as they should, and getting massively ripped off so Helmsley can buy another villa ala vineyard on the South Italy coast. Or whatever he and his CEO cronies do with all that money. And because MSmedia is owned and run by essentially the same people who own and run the insurance companies, and is therefore keeping its collective mouth shut, Republicans get to scream some more that "Obama-care doesn't work!" without revealing the real reason why, and that they're the ones responsible for it. Conveniently during the election.

This is how the Republicans do it. Remember this. Remember the name Marco Rubio and Republicans when your premiums go up. This is why we need single-payer health insurance (Medicare for All). Health care cannot work as long as it's conducted as a for-profit enterprise. And as it is essential to life, it should not be for profit, any more than water, or fire departments should be for profit. I'm not saying we shouldn't all pay for these services, nor that people should not make a decent living from helping to provide them. I'm saying that particular individuals should not be allowed to take ridiculous profits from doing work that is necessary to human beings' basic survival. Certainly people who simply shuffle the money around for these services, or coordinate the processes involved, should not be taking huge profits, adding to everyone's costs. Given that people die without them, that is extortion, and abuse of power. (We actually used to understand these principles in America. These things went without saying.)

Yeah. Obama-care: The only health care solution Republicans would even marginally accept. A system modeled after Republican plans (specifically, as I recall, Mitt Romney's). A system that doesn't work, because the Republicans won't allow it to work... Nice.

Republicans Believe Our Government Should Be Used To Attack Their Political Opponents

The Republicans have very different ideas about what democracy is supposed to do. Sometimes they even admit it openly. A few examples:

The purpose of Congressional committees is to destroy Democratic candidates’ poll numbers.

(EJ Dionne wrote an excellent column about the vendetta of the Benghazi panel)

The purpose of the U.S. Senate is to make sure Democratic presidents fail.

The purpose of Republican-led state legislatures is to make it harder for people to vote so Republicans are elected president.

This is not a new thing. Nixon used the IRS and FBI and tried to use the CIA to attack his political enemies. It appears more evident each year that Dick Cheney used our military and our sons and daughters enlisted in it to carry out a personal agenda involving acquisition of oil reserves in Iraq and large contracts for his former company, Halliburton. It was a war that multiplied the value of his Halliburton stock portfolio.

Each example points to the likelihood that abuse of power has remained a part of the Republican DNA since the day 41 years ago when Nixon's abuse of power brought his resignation and disgrace. It doesn't seem to embarrass or disgrace Republicans anymore because they believe they were elected to government to abuse its power. Democracy isn't for the people, it's for the Right People.

In 1980, the founder of the Heritage Foundation stated the Republican/conservative strategy very clearly.

Paul Weyrich didn’t believe in Good Government. He called it the “goo goo syndrome.” He didn’t want people to vote. The group he was addressing represented conservative Christianity. They apparently believe the reason there is a God is to enhance the personal power and wealth of “the right people." Every kind of bigotry and economic unfairness flows from this. Democracy is supposed to protect us from this kind of abuse, but it doesn't when those we elect use their new power for personal vendettas.

Ronald Reagan addressed this same gathering and was elected later that year by the same conservative movement that still is trying to break our democratic system.

Books have been written about how successful the vandals have been, but very little of this gets into the nightly news. To criticize one party requires our “fair and balanced” news anchors to find something equally bad to say about the other party.

On the day Obama was inaugurated Republican congressional leaders met and agreed on a plan to oppose everything he did and to refuse any manner of compromise on any issue even if the president's proposal were something they had supported in the past, like healthcare reform based on private insurers and an insurance mandate.

A book was written about this conspiracy, titled Do Not Ask What Good We Do.

Another, co-authored by Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of Brookings, placed most of the blame on the Republicans.

The Republican goal is to make government stop working.

Why?

Because each public institution they can destroy will offer an opportunity for their corporate clients to exploit.

Government looks at public needs as a moral duty. Corporations look at them as an opportunity to leverage necessity into large profits. The greater and more desperate the need, the greater the profit.

Ultimately Republicans would like our government run like a corporation, from the top down, with a command structure, where people do as their told, where the boss’s motives are never questioned. Americans who want a corporate tough guy as our next president do not seem to realize that corporations are not run democratically. In their blind admiration of "business" Americans forget what happens when business and government are in cahoots. There is a name for this. It’s called fascism. It’s been tried in many places. In Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, and in many smaller tin-pot dictatorships that have operated under the aegis of American corporations and their military allies. But fascism ruled most notoriously in Hitler’s Germany. It was not a successful experiment and it took millions of lives to remove it.