To Shore Up The 1% They Were Willing To Destroy Democracy

They hate the government for taxing them and regulating them, so they decided to destroy it, which means they decided to destroy our democracy because that’s the kind of government we have here.

It began in the 70s with a memo Lewis Powell wrote to the US Chamber of Commerce. Workers had rights, polluters were being regulated, corporations didn’t like being taxed and regulated by a public sector that inhibited them from predatory practices.

You can read up on Lewis Powell at Bill Moyers' website, and learn more about Powell's influential memo that stole the economy back for the plutocrats. Powell went on to sit on the Supreme Court and help convert it into a law firm for the wealthy.

In the 70s the super-rich decided enough was enough and decided to fight back.

Slowly, over the past 3 or 4 decades, workers’ incomes have flatlined and infrastructure, schools, and trusted institutions have been deliberately degraded.

The Right knew that the only way to destroy democratic government was to defund it, degrade it, discredit it, make it not work, make people distrust and dislike it.

Now the Congress is owned by the people who own for a living. The Court works for the people who own for a living. And the president is one of the people who own for a living.

The Citizens United court ruling turned democracy into a proxy operation by which ordinary people voted for their government but wealthy corporate clubs owned and operated one major party and dominated the Supreme Court through the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth and a whole zoo of upliftingly and patriotically and vaguely named non-profits devoted to free market absolutism.

Bill Moyers has some very good analysis of the powerful octopus of tax-free lobbying operations led by Heritage.

They had a single goal: the total levitation of the owning classes above the bothersome social responsibilities that constitute citizenship, the stuff contained in the social contract by which you contribute of yourself and expect decency and fair play in return. The corporate absolutists who drove this Big Idea felt no obligations beyond themselves and felt the average citizen and his or her government owed them absolute freedom of action and total obedience. When you’re very very big and powerful your dreams are big too. The 1% now own the world.

Have We No Sense of Decency At Long Last?

“One cannot really love Jesus and wish to follow him and also vote for a person who so clearly embodies the opposite of everything Christ taught, died for and demands of us.”

The Christian view expressed in the Dallas Morning News

"Listen: it is not politics as usual when one camp continually threatens the other with imprisonment and death, screaming female-specific vulgarities, painting her face on targets, hoisting her effigy being hanged. No candidate in the history of the US, Barack Obama included, has been subjected to so much jubilant violation.
I suffer these humiliations as my own and can’t understand why voters stand by with arms crossed, assessing her stamina and valour while Clinton is taking it on the chin. How have we not exploded into a new civil rights movement with women and men together rushing on to the streets to demand that female humanity matters? Where is our primal scream against being bullied, dismissed, reviled for the misdeeds of others and witch-hunted for the crime of being competent while female?"

In the Guardian, Barbara Kingsolver invites us to repudiate Trump and his vile bullying.

The Republicans have wrapped themselves in Trumpism because, at the end of 35 years, Reaganomics itself is being revealed as a long con. Probably the most successful and enduring scam in our history.

The Long Con from Reagan to Trump, in the Guardian.

The Hillary hate is a dangerous poison fabricated out of fringe ideas and carefully cultivated insecurities. Ever noticed how Trump takes the things he’s accused of and thrown them back on his opponents? The irony is deeper than that. The cause of the insecurities that fuel the right wing anger can be found in their own movement. It was Reaganomics that destroyed working incomes and working class prosperity. Reagan plus Gingrich plus W and Cheney equals Trump. The long long con game has come home to roost and they have learned to worship it.

CNN sorts through the paranoid fringe of Hillary haters.

Two wrongly debunked ideas have re-emerged and may yet prove themselves right.

1. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that Hillary cited decades ago, which was laughed at then, is so visibly and tangibly real today it’s amazing no journalists have admitted it’s real and reported on it. Maybe because they hesitate to prove her right. (That would be “bias”.) Pulitzers are won by telling the truth people have avoided hearing.

2. The Silent Majority. Nixon’s favorite hatchet man, Pat Buchanan, slipped the phrase to him in 1969 and both Nixon and Agnew used it to powerful effect. But Creedence also invoked it in their song Effigy, released the day before Nixon used in his November 1969 speech, so maybe it’s their line. But the phrase goes further back than Nixon and the sixties. The point I’m getting at is a belief that there are a lot more Americans who are lining up against Trumpism than we are hearing about in the polls. A silent majority. The polls have seesawed as news came out favoring one or the other because news that benefits one side or the other encourages people to voice that opinion to poll takers. I’m convinced most Americans are simply keeping their opinions to themselves because the Republicans have poisoned the public conversation where such opinions are voiced. A silent majority.

I get back to what Joseph Welch said to Senator Joe McCarthy, which finally took the wind out of the malign gasbag: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

This should be addressed at the entire Republican Party, not just to Donald Trump and his surrogates.