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Republicans yesterday proposed an appropriations bill that will allocate a billion dollars to pay for Trump’s Golden Epstein Dance Hall (aka “Ballroom”). Every penny of it will be borrowed and we’ll be paying interest on that money for the rest of our lifetimes unless something dramatic changes.

This year, America will spend over a trillion dollars just to pay interest on the current $39 trillion national debt, a debt entirely the result of a 45-year-long GOP scam designed to make the rich richer and elect Republicans, all while simultaneously screwing Democrats and average working class people.

It’s the biggest scandal of the century and is almost never mentioned by the press, even when they noted last week that — for the first time since World War II — our debt is now larger than our entire economy. And by 2030, Fortune magazine reports, we’ll be paying $2 trillion in interest at the current rate of burn, as Republicans add more and more items to the national debt every day.

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To put that in context, here’s the “lost opportunity cost” of what that trillion dollars a year we now pay in interest — roughly $3000 every year for every man, woman, and child in the country — on the GOP’s Debt could do for America:

— First, it could guarantee universal childcare and early childhood education nationwide that would free millions of parents to work or start businesses and would pay long-term dividends in better educational outcomes.

— Second, it could make all public colleges, universities, and trade schools tuition-free, while also wiping out existing federal student loan debt over time.

— Third, the U.S. could establish a universal healthcare system or at least a robust public option with zero premiums and minimal out-of-pocket costs, ending medical bankruptcies and improving public health outcomes.

— Fourth, it could fully fund a national infrastructure modernization program, repairing every deficient bridge in the country, rebuild highways, expand mass transit, and replace aging water systems, including lead pipe removal nationwide.

— Fifth, a trillion dollars a year could finance a rapid transition to clean energy: building out solar and wind at scale, modernizing the grid, subsidizing home electrification, and accelerating EV infrastructure to catch up with China.

— Sixth, it could end homelessness in America, with massive savings in healthcare and policing.

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— Seventh, we could provide a guaranteed basic income (~$500 to $1,000 a month) to every adult American, or a more targeted version for lower- and middle-income households, dramatically reducing poverty.

— Eighth, it could expand Social Security and Medicare benefits significantly — raising monthly checks, lowering the retirement age, or both — while shoring up the system’s long-term solvency.

— Ninth, the U.S. could also fund universal paid family and medical leave, so no one ever again has to go to work sick or choose between a paycheck and caring for a newborn or a sick relative.

— Tenth, it could dramatically increase teacher pay, reducing class sizes, modernizing school facilities, and providing universal free school meals.

— Eleventh, it could launch a large-scale affordable housing initiative, building millions of units, stabilizing rents, and helping first-time homebuyers with down payments.

— Twelfth, it could rebuild and expand public health infrastructure, including pandemic preparedness, local health departments, research funding, and domestic manufacturing of critical medicines and supplies.

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And even after doing several of those at once, there’d still be room for things like universal broadband, modernizing the postal system, expanding national parks and conservation efforts, and funding scientific research at levels that could accelerate breakthroughs in everything from cancer to renewables to clean water.

None of these things are happening, though, because Republicans insist “we can’t afford them because of the national debt” that they, themselves created.

It all started in the 1970s when Republican strategist Jude Wanniski noted that Republicans were viewed as Grinches while Democrats — who’d brought the people the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, free college, and dozens of other popular programs — were viewed as Santas.

His solution was twofold: have Republicans become the “tax-cut Santas” while forcing Democrats to “shoot their own Santa” in the face by cutting back on those gift-like programs.

The strategy was elegantly simple, and was adopted by the GOP in the first year of the Reagan presidency and is still in full operation. In his 8 years, he tripled our national debt from $800 billion all the way up to $2.4 trillion and every Republican since has continued the plan. (There’s a more complete explanation and timeline here.) The Two Santas scheme has two parts:

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1. When a Republican is in the White House, spend money like a drunken sailor, running up the debt as hard and fast as possible. All this deficit spending on the national credit card also produces “good times” by stimulating the economy like crazy, making Americans think Republicans are good with economics when in fact they’re only good at spending borrowed money.

2. When a Democrat is in the White House, start screaming about the debt and how “our children will have to pay for this!!!” to force that president and the Democrats in Congress to “shoot” their own social programs by cutting them back, producing hard times and reducing the deficits.

To justify all this deficit spending, Wanniski invented a term, “supply-side economics,” arguing that tax cuts for the morbidly rich would pay for themselves as wealth “trickled down” to average working people, and Art Laffer handily supplied a “curve” that seemed technical and scientific. The media lapped it up.

It was all, of course, bullshit, but the American press bought it and no Republican has been seriously challenged on it in 45 years.

The combined Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts along with Bush’s two wars add up to more than our current national debt of ~$39 trillion. And the only way to fix all this without causing horrible pain for the American people is to undo those three presidents’ tax cuts and take America back to the tax system we had in 1980.

When Democrats take over and end the current GOP fascist experiment, they’ll have a huge job to do, unwinding all of this debt. Fully a third of all the debt in American history has come from one president — Trump — who once bragged:

“I’m the king of debt. I’m great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me.”

Trump’s billion-dollar Golden Epstein Dance Hall is just the latest gilded insult borrowed against our children’s future, while the trillion dollars a year we now pay in interest on the GOP’s 45-year “Two Santas” tax-cut scam could be ending homelessness, guaranteeing healthcare, rebuilding our schools, and lifting millions out of poverty.

It’s beyond time to roll back the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for the morbidly rich. As Graham Platner says, “We have to use the tax code to take back the money they’ve stolen from us.”

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It’ll be a big job and the billionaires and big business will squeal like stuck pigs, but our debt — and the interest payments on it — have finally reached the point where the GOP’s Two Santas strategy risks crashing the nation’s entire economy.

Democrats need to start talking about this now and point out clearly how we got here with Wanniski‘s Two Santas strategy!

Share this article widely so Americans understand that every ballroom tile and each billionaire tax break has been paid for by Republicans stealing the prosperity working people once enjoyed and now deserve to get back.

Louise’s Daily Song: “You Sent the Bill”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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In a recent podcast interview with The New York Times, political science Professor Robert Pape pointed out that acceptance of political violence is today higher than it’s been in generations. Tens of millions of Americans, his research shows, are now accepting of things as extreme as assassination as a way to change politics.

This follows the third attempt at Trump’s life, the murder of prominent Democratic politicians in Minnesota, the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the ICE assassinations of at least three US citizens in the past year.

We’re also seeing an increasing acceptance of violence toward minorities and women.

ICE brutalizes mostly Hispanics, including children, sending them to foreign torture camps, deporting them to Congo and other war-torn hellholes, and keeping over 70,000 — including thousands of children — in brutal, primitive conditions that in some cases would get an animal shelter closed down.

Violence against women is also increasingly accepted across the right wing of American society. Trump has been credibly accused of multiple rapes and assaults (and nailed for one by a jury of his peers), Hegseth’s own mother called out how he’s abused his previous wives, and accused rapists like the Tate brothers are tight with the Trump boys as an online “Rape Academy” got 62 million American visitors in a single month this year alone.

Republicans shrug it all off — or revel in it— while attacking and dismantling DEI and “woke” as anti-white-male, as if it’s all just fine with them. Bring up the topic and you’re accused of being a snowflake.

What the hell is going on? Why have American men — particularly white men — seemingly gone violently nuts over the past generation or two? Why do they revel in images and memes of violence and follow so-called “manosphere influencers”?

This is being driven by three factors: economics, racism, and misogyny that have been brought together in this moment as a perfect storm.

Republicans understand this well — after all, they are driving it — and if Democrats fail to figure the dynamic out and offer clear, specific, concrete fixes they’ll continue to get beat at the polls and the problem of political violence will expand, no matter how badly Trump and the GOP screw things up.

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First, there’s the economics.

When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 and declared war on the New Deal and unions while cutting income taxes on billionaires from 74% to virtually nothing, a massive $80 trillion transfer of wealth began. It wiped out worker protections, froze wages, ended most pensions, and — over the past 45 years — have taken the middle class from two-thirds of us down to around 43 percent of us.

To add insult to injury, men who once defined their masculinity by their ability to singularly provide for their families now have to rely on their wives working to keep a household together. And even that wasn’t enough for Republicans; today over half of working Americans are a few paychecks away from homelessness or bankruptcy as a result of these GOP policies and tax cuts.

Rush Limbaugh was the first to identify this back in the 1990s, calling women who worked and demanded equal rights and pay “Feminazis.” He legitimized that sort of rhetoric, blaming the emasculation of working class men at the hands of corporate bosses on their wives and other women in the workplace.

Republicans in Congress joined the chorus, publicly and proudly opposing the Equal Rights Amendment, which simply and entirely says, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” They continue to block it to this day.

Trump’s famous claim that he could sexually assault any woman he wanted because “when you’re a star, they let you do it” added to the Republican permission structure, giving modern rape culture a huge boost.

But Republicans didn’t just blame the collapse of the middle class on women in the workplace; they also claimed that Blacks and Hispanics were “stealing jobs” and “driving down wages” to deflect attention from the GOP-aligned fatcats whose singular agenda is to “control labor costs” to increase profits and add to billionaires’ money bins.

On this issue of race, there are two clear factors. The first of these reminds us of the last era of widespread white adoption of organized racism when President Woodrow Wilson sponsored a White House screening of the Klan recruiting film Birth of a Nation in 1915 and then embraced an eugenics movement that was explicitly grounded in ideas of a racial hierarchy of intellect and talent with whites on top.

The result of the President of the United States endorsing white supremacy that year was immediate and widespread: membership in the Klan, which had been moribund for a generation, exploded from an estimated 400,000 to over four million in fewer than two years. Klan marches coinciding with the Fourth of July and other patriotic holidays became commonplace events in American cities (30,000 Klansmen marched in Washington, DC in 1925, for example) until the fever was broken by World War II.

Donald Trump and the racist lickspittles he’s surrounded himself with have created a similar permission and endorsement atmosphere over the past fifteen years, starting with the racist “birther” attacks on Barack Obama he rolled out in March of 2011.

Now Trump’s even more explicitly and publicly racist, routinely using the epithets “thug” and “low IQ” to smear any Black person he thinks opposes him. Most recently he applied both to Hakeem Jeffries — who graduated from NYU Law School Magna Cum Laude and holds a Masters degree from Georgetown — this past weekend. (Trump refuses to release his own college transcripts.)

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Trump’s explicit beyond-dog-whistle racism now echoes through the ranks of his white supremacist regime. The last Black Republicans will leave the House of Representatives this year, and six “conservatives” on the Supreme Court just let former Confederate states destroy any vestige of Black representation in the South through extreme gerrymandering.

Whiskey Pete Hegseth is purging the senior ranks of our military of Black and female officers after Trump allegedly said he “didn’t want to be seen” with one, Stephen Miller is on a jeremiad to purge America of Black and Hispanic immigrants, Black history is being stripped from our national monuments and museums, and federal contracts are being denied to any organizations with a policy of encouraging diversity in the workplace.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that pasty-white South African immigrant Elon Musk has put up around 850 arguably racist tweets to his social media platform just in the past six months, many warning of the coming extinction of white people in America. They found:

“More than half of those posts have used the word ‘white.’ The billionaire has posted on X about race nearly daily — 166 out of 197 days — from last October to mid-April, The Post analysis found.”

The apparent reason for Musk’s panic and this recent explosion of virulent racism in America isn’t limited to Trump and the racists he’s surrounded himself with. America is browning, largely because of a 1965 change in our immigration laws that ended racial quotas, and white people are noticing.

Since that year, 59 million people have legally immigrated to America, shifting the white population from 85% white in 1965 to 58% white today. Within a decade, if current trends continue, we’ll be a majority-minority country, as Texas already is. This has caused a panic among those like Trump and his white billionaire buddies who think that race defines what they call “culture” and lament the loss of “Anglo-Saxon cultural values” (code for white people).

So, what are Democrats and people of good will to do? I have three suggestions to dial back white male America’s embrace of political and racial violence, and with a sufficiently large electoral majority all three can be pursued simultaneously.

First, bring back a healthy middle class. This isn’t rocket science: FDR did it in the 1930s and 1940s, and Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all expanded his New Deal.

This would involve:

— Rolling back the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for corporations and the morbidly rich, restoring tax rates as they were in 1980 when our national debt was less that one trillion dollars and we were on a steady path to paying that off.

— Joining every other developed country in the world in offering a free or low-cost national healthcare system and offer free or low-cost college to anybody who can qualify, while ending all student debt as Joe Biden tried to do.

— Enforce anti-trust laws, repeal the “right to work for less” Taft-Hartley Act, and outlaw the billion-dollar union busting industry while enforcing workers’ right to representation and democracy in the workplace.

Next, deal with the “race problem” in America by passing legislation outlawing gerrymandering and other ways Republicans politically disenfranchise non-whites. Strengthen anti-racism laws and have the FBI go after racist groups rather than persecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Launch a national education program about America’s racial history to build understanding and empathy among white people and empower the newly emerging majority.

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Finally, to deal with misogyny, as a society we must work to redefine masculinity around competence and contribution rather than control of women, a message President Obama once took on. Being a man isn’t about being the sole breadwinner; it’s about being reliable, emotionally literate, and capable, being someone who shows up for family, work, and community. And bring back DEI — which principally benefited white women — and put it back into law.

For half a century, Republicans have bled white working class men dry, hoovered up their wealth and given it to the Bezos’ and Zuckerbergs, and fought to keep the middle class from re-emerging in a way that might slightly dent corporate and billionaire profits.

The acceptance of political violence, the rising racism, and the open misogyny we’re seeing across America aren’t a mystery but are the predictable result of 45 years of GOP policy that gutted the middle class and then sold white men the lie that women, Blacks, and immigrants were the ones to blame.

It’s time the Democratic Party started telling Americans the truth and setting out a clear vision to remedy these decades of Republican vandalism that have brought us to this perilous, violent moment in our nation’s history. Share this article widely so more Americans can see clearly who’s actually been robbing them, and join me in the fight for a Democratic Party willing to tell the truth and finally solve this growing crisis of political violence.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Sold You Hate”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Nikita Khrushchev famously said “We will bury you” (“My vas pokhoronim”) to Western ambassadors in Moscow on November 18, 1956. Seventy years later, it appears that Russia’s goal is being realized.

Putin called Trump last Wednesday and they talked for almost two hours; fewer than three days later, America announced we’re pulling 5,000 US troops out of the NATO forces in Germany, accomplishing a 60-year-long Russian goal. Trump also ended sanctions on Russian oil, handing the Putin regime billions in revenue, while continuing to block US weapons delivery to Ukraine.

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Meanwhile, HHS Secretary brainworm-infected heroin and sex addict Bob Kennedy has hollowed out America’s core public health infrastructure and elevated anti-vaccine messaging, undermining trust in immunization and disease prevention. The result is a sicker and more vulnerable America as measles and whooping cough outbreaks spread across the nation and US science leadership in the world has been kneecapped.

Over at the Pentagon, Whiskey Pete Hegseth, whose mother says he abuses women, has purged senior career leadership of women and Blacks and weakened the independence of the JAG corps, eroding professional military norms and devastating morale. He’s stupidly burned through so much ordnance with his illegal, unconstitutional Middle East war crimes that our military readiness and deterrence capacity are at an all-time low in the modern era.

Through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Nazi-saluting, multiple-baby-producing, ketamine-shooting billionaire Elon Musk has impaired basic federal functions and hollowed out institutional expertise. When he destroyed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), killing millions in the Third World, both China and Russia swept in to fill the vacuum and secure key natural resources and strategic military outposts.

Over at the Voice Of America, sore loser conspiracy nut Kari Lake has turned the network from independent journalism into a rightwing propaganda operation that delights Putin and damages U.S. credibility abroad, weakening a cornerstone of America’s advocacy for democracy and soft power.

With ICE and an ever-expanding network of concentration camps, brutal racist Stephen Miller has driven hardline immigration policies that gut asylum processes and expand detention (even for children), straining courts, destroying our reputation around the world, and devastating tourism.

Over at the Office of Management and Budget, billionaire-lapdog and neofascist ideologue Russell Vought has weaponized budget authority to illegally defund agencies and programs Congress authorized, concentrating power in the hands of the president, undermining constitutional checks, and destabilizing federal operations.

The FBI has been weaponized by the unqualified drunk Ka$h Patel (as he brands himself), politicizing investigations and purging career officials, weakening the bureau’s independence and ability to fight actual crime, while complicating intelligence cooperation with allies.

After showboat Kristi Noem destroyed the credibility of DHS with mass detention policies and multiple unaccountable murders of American citizens, former plumber Markwayne Mullen continues to gut civil liberties safeguards and execute Miller’s vision of a nearly-all-white America.

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Wrestling billionaire Linda McMahon is actively vandalizing the Department of Education, cutting support for public schools and student protections in ways that widen inequality and weaken long-term workforce competitiveness.

Climate change denier and fracking company CEO Chris Wright now runs the Department of Energy, which has been redirected toward aggressive fossil fuel expansion while obliterating clean-energy initiatives, making America weaker and more vulnerable to both climate disasters and oil supply disruptions.

Under fossil fuel shill Doug Burgum’s leadership at Interior, the National Park Service is being dismantled by political interference, workforce depletion, corruption, and the systematic erasure of American history. He’s prioritized drilling and mining over conservation, producing long-term environmental damage, while corruptly moving $100 million in our tax dollars over to a group run by Trump loyalists.

At the Department of Justice Pam Bondi (who dropped an investigation into Trump University when he gave her campaign $25,000) and now Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and Ghislaine Maxwell buddy Todd Blanche continue to hide the Trump-Epstein files and have gutted enforcement against polluters, fraudsters, and other white-collar criminals while pushing hard to torment and bankrupt with malicious prosecution those individuals who’ve called out Trump’s corruption.

Failed reality-TV star Sean Duffy now runs the Transportation Department, where oversight has been loosened in key safety and infrastructure areas. The result is increased risk for the traveling public in aviation, rail, and roadway systems while much-needed modernization has been delayed or killed off altogether.

Billionaire Scott Bessent controls America’s Treasury as he pushes deregulation and financial concentration, helping his fellow billionaires while increasing the systemic risk that inevitably hits homeowners, small investors, and average working people like it did in 2008.

Billionaire and former Epstein Island buddy Howard Lutnick now runs the Commerce Department, pushing Trump’s tariffs and politicized trade decisions, disrupting supply chains and straining longstanding relationships with trading partners while exploding inflation here at home.

Real estate billionaire Steve Witkoff, with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, has screwed up our negotiations with Iran to the point that gas is now pushing five bucks a gallon here and the world is horrified. His sons hooked up with the Trump kids to make millions off their dads’ government jobs as Witkoff himself regularly travels to Moscow to consult with Putin.

Rightwing crank Brooke Rollins runs USDA programs that have been reshaped to favor large agribusiness over small and mid-size farms while stripping millions of American children from food stamps and school meals, hitting rural America particularly hard.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, carbon hustler Lee Zeldin has rolled back pollution and climate regulations while reducing enforcement capacity, delighting Putin and increasing profits for fossil fuel billionaires.

Scott Turner is turning HUD from a pro-housing agency into one that pushes rightwing talking points and is shedding programs designed to give housing access to low-income and homeless families.

Putin-friendly Tulsi Gabbard now oversees the nation’s Intelligence agencies, politicizing their assessments while sidelining career analysts and distorting threat reporting. As a result, our allies have become less willing to share sensitive intelligence and Russia’s power is increased.

And at the State Department, Marco Rubio has hollowed out diplomatic staff and reduced emphasis on alliances and multilateral engagement, weakening U.S. influence and opening space for Russia and China to set the agenda.

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This list is an operational blueprint, the kind of document a hostile foreign intelligence service might draw up if it had been handed unlimited access to the executive branch and told to dismantle the American republic from inside without firing a single shot:

— Hollow out the public health system so disease can do its work,
— Demoralize the officer corps and burn through munitions in unconstitutional wars,
— Terminate the diplomats and intelligence professionals who keep allies aligned,
— Replace independent journalism with state propaganda at Voice of America,
— Defund the agencies Congress created,
— Abandon the clean energy transition that would have weakened OPEC and Russia simultaneously,
— Politicize the FBI and DOJ so they target dissenters instead of crooks, and
— Turn armed, masked ICE thugs loose to terrorize immigrant communities while training the rest of us to accept anonymous federal agents disappearing our neighbors into massive concentration camps.

Every line item that would appear on such a plan has been checked off in the last 14 months, executed by a cabinet of grifters, ideologues, and 13 billionaires whose loyalty runs to Trump and the morbidly rich rather than to the nation whose Constitution they swore an oath to defend.

When Louise and I lived in Germany back in the 1980s, we could feel what the American military presence meant to the Germans we shared meals and beers with. The GIs at Ramstein and Grafenwöhr weren’t an abstraction or a budget line; they were the visible, daily reassurance that the United States had learned the lessons of 1914 and 1939 and that we would never again let Europe sleepwalk into catastrophe.

Older Germans I met would talk about the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift the way Americans of that generation talked about Pearl Harbor or the moon landing, with a kind of stunned gratitude that another country had voluntarily done such a thing for them.

That moral capital, accumulated over eight decades and across both Republican and Democratic administrations, is precisely what Trump’s people set on fire this week, with the Pentagon’s announced 5,000-troop withdrawal coming on the heels of that nearly two-hour Putin call and Trump’s weekend promise that we’re cutting “a lot further” still.

In Europe, Boris Pistorius, Donald Tusk, Friedrich Merz, and Keir Starmer are now openly discussing how to defend the continent without us, which is exactly the world Vladimir Putin has been trying to engineer ever since the day he first took over the Kremlin.

The grim irony of Khrushchev’s famous threat is that he never literally meant we’d be “buried” by a tank or warhead (although rightwingers loved to claim it did).

The Russian phrase “My vas pokhoronim” was a Marxist taunt lifted from Marx’s line about the proletariat being capitalism’s gravedigger, and what Khrushchev was actually saying — as he later explained at length in Yugoslavia — was that history itself would do the work because socialism would outlast and replace what he called the rotting capitalist order.

He was wrong on the substance, of course, since the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991, buried by its own corruption and by the open society it had spent half a century trying to subvert. But he may have been right about something deeper than ideology: a great power can absolutely be killed from the inside by people who pretend to govern while methodically removing every load-bearing wall in the structure just to enrich themselves.

That’s the project Trump’s cabinet is executing in plain sight right now, and the only force on earth capable of stopping it is the same force that both beat back fascism in 1945 and, after the Republican Great Depression, built the very institutions we’re watching get demolished: ordinary Americans deciding we’ve finally had enough.

So, pick up the phone today and call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and your representative that you want hearings, subpoenas, and roll-call votes on the troop withdrawal from Germany, the lifting of Russian oil sanctions, and the anti-American behavior of every cabinet officer named above.

Check your voter registration at vote.org because next year’s midterms are the last reasonable opportunity to take Congress back before this administration finishes the job it’s started.

Look up your state legislative races and your secretary of state at openstates.org, because the firewall against rigged 2028 results is going to be built, or not built, in our statehouses.

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And support independent journalism wherever you find it (and share this newsletter), because Voice of America is gone, public broadcasting is on the chopping block, and the legacy press is already in capitulation mode as anti-democracy billionaires buy up one outlet after another.

Khrushchev never managed to bury us. Let’s make damn sure Trump, Putin, and America’s rightwing billionaires don’t either.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Bury Us From Within”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Neoliberalism comes to America

In America it was inflation that opened the door to Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism.

Inflation is usually caused by one of two things: international devaluation or internal dilution of a country’s currency, or widespread shortages of essential commodities that drive up prices enough to echo through the entire economy.

The early 1970s got both, one deliberately and the other as the result of war.

Between 1971 and 1973, President Nixon pulled the US out of the Bretton Woods economic framework that had been put together after World War II to stabilize the world’s currencies and balance trade. The dollar had been pegged to gold at $35 an ounce, and the world’s other currencies were effectively pegged to the dollar.

But the United States couldn’t buy enough gold to support the number of dollars we needed as our economy grew, so on August 15, 1971 Nixon announced to the nation and the world that he was taking the dollar off the gold standard and putting a ten percent tariff on most imports of finished goods into the US to deal with the changes in the dollar’s value relative to other currencies.

The immediate result was the value of the dollar rose as the world breathed a sigh of relief that the “gold crisis” was coming to an end and the dollar would become more portable. But an increased value in the dollar relative to other currencies meant that products manufactured in the US became more expensive overseas, hurting our exports.

At that at that time there were 60,000 more factories in the US than today and Wal-Mart was advertising that everything in their stores was “Made in the USA”[lxix]: exports were an important part of our economy and imports were mostly raw materials or “exotic” goods not produced here like sandalwood from Thailand or French wines.[lxx]

To deal with the “strong dollar” problem, Nixon announced in December, 1971 that the US was devaluing our currency relative to the Japanese Yen, German Mark and British Pound (among others) by 11 percent. It was the first-ever negotiated realignment of the world’s major currencies, and Nixon crowed it was “the greatest monetary agreement in the history of the world.”

But we were still importing more and more goods from overseas, particularly cars from Japan, increasing our trade deficit and hurting American jobs that manufactured goods like cars that competed with the Japanese and the Germans. So in the second week of February, 1973 Nixon did it again, negotiating a further devaluation of the dollar by 10 percent.[lxxi]

While devaluing the dollar against other currencies didn’t have much immediate impact on products grown or made in the US from US raw materials, it did mean that the prices of imports (including oil, which was the primary energy supply for pretty much everything in America) went up.

Over the next decade, the impact of that devaluation would work its way through the American economy in the form of a mild inflation, which Nixon thought could be easily controlled by Fed monetary policy.

What he hadn’t figured on, though, was the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Because America took Israel’s side in the war, the Arab states cut off their supply of oil to the US in October 1973. As the State Department’s history of the time notes, “The price of oil per barrel first doubled, then quadrupled, imposing skyrocketing costs on consumers and structural challenges to the stability of whole national economies.”[lxxii]

Everything in America depended on oil, from manufacturing fertilizer to powering tractors, from lighting up cities to moving cars and trucks down the highway, from heating homes to powering factories. As a result, the price of everything went up: it was a classic supply-shock-driven inflation.

The war ended on January 19, 1974 and the Arab nations lifted their embargo on US oil in March of that year.[lxxiii] Between two devaluations and the explosion in oil prices, inflation in the US was running red-hot by the mid-1970s and it would take about a decade for it to be wrung out of our economy through Fed actions and normal readjustments in the international and domestic marketplace.

But Americans were furious. The price of pretty much everything was up by 10 percent or more, and wages weren’t keeping pace. Strikes started to roil the economy as Nixon was busted for accepting bribes and authorizing a break-in at the DNC’s headquarters in the Watergate complex. Nixon left office and Jerry Ford became our president, launching his campaign to stabilize the dollar with a nationally televised speech on October 8, 1974.[lxxiv]

Ford’s program included a 5 percent increase in top-end income taxes, cuts to federal spending, and “the creation of a voluntary inflation-fighting organization, named ‘Whip Inflation Now’ (WIN).”[lxxv] The inflation rate in 1974 peaked at 12.3 percent and home mortgage rates were going through the roof.

WIN became a joke, inflation persisted and got worse as we got locked into a wage-price spiral (particularly after Nixon’s wage-price controls ended), and President Ford was replaced by President Jimmy Carter in the election of 1976.

But inflation persisted as the realignment of the US dollar and the price of oil was forcing a market response to the value of the dollar. (An “x” percent annual inflation rate means, practically speaking, that the dollar has lost “x” percent of its value that year.)

The inflation rates for 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980 were, respectively, 6.7%, 9.0%, 13.3% and 12.5%.[lxxvi]

In 1978, Margaret Thatcher came to power in the United Kingdom and, advised by neoliberals at the UK-based private think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), began a massive program of crushing that country’s labor unions while privatizing as much of the country’s infrastructure as she could, up to and including British Airways and British Rail.

She appointed Geoffrey Howe, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and friend of Milton Friedman, as her Chancellor of the Exchequer (like the American Secretary of the Treasury) to run the British economy. Friedman, crowing about his own influence on Howe and the IEA’s founder Sir Antony Fisher wrote, “the U-turn in British policy executed by Margaret Thatcher owes more to him (i.e., Fisher) than any other individual.”[lxxvii]

The ideas of neoliberalism had, by this time, spread across the world and Thatcher was getting international applause for being the world’s first major economy to put them into place. Pressure built on President Carter to do the same, and, hoping it might help whip inflation, he deregulated the US trucking and airline industries, among others, in the last two years of his presidency.

Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and when he came into office he jumped into neoliberal policy with both feet, starting by crushing the air traffic controllers’ union, PATCO, in a single week. Union busting, welfare-cutting, “free trade,” and deregulation were the themes of Reagan’s eight years, then carried on another four years by President George HW Bush, whose administration negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

America was now officially on the neoliberal path, and Friedman and his Mont Pelerin buddies were cheering it on.

By 1982 inflation was down from 1981’s 8.9% to a respectable and tolerable 3.8%; it averaged around that for the rest of the decade. Instead of pointing out that it normally takes a supply-shock inflation and a currency-devaluation inflation a decade or two to work itself out, the American media gave Reagan and neoliberalism all the credit.[lxxviii] Milton Friedman, after all, had made his reputation as the great scholar of inflation and was a relentless self-promoter, appearing in newspapers and news magazines almost every week in one way or another.

Claiming neoliberal policies had crushed over a decade of inflation in a single year, and ignoring that it was just the normal wringing-out of inflation from the economy, Reagan openly embraced neoliberalism with a passion at every level of his administration.

Reagan embarked on a series of massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich, dropping the top tax bracket from 74 percent when he came into office down to 25 percent. He borrowed the money to pay for it, tripling the national debt from roughly $800 billion in 1980 to $2.4 trillion when he left office, and the effect of that $2 trillion he put on the nation’s credit card was a sharp economic stimulus for which Reagan took the credit.

He deregulated financial markets and Savings & Loan (S&L) banks, letting Wall Street raiders walk away with billions while gutting S&Ls so badly that the federal government had to bail out the industry by replacing about $100 billion the bankers had stolen.[lxxix]

“Greed is good!” was the new slogan, junk bonds became a thing, and Mergers and Acquisitions experts or “M&A Artists” who called themselves “Masters of the Universe” became the nation’s heroes, lionized in movies like Michael Douglas’ 1987 Wall Street.

Reagan signed Executive Order 12291 which required all federal agencies to use a cost-benefit estimate when putting together federal rules and regulations. Instead of considering externalities costs (things like the damage pollution does to people or how bank rip-offs hurt the middle class), however, the only “costs” his administration worried about were expenses to industry.

He cut the regulatory power of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and his head of that organization, Anne Gorsuch (mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch) was, as Newsweek noted, “involved in a nasty scandal involving political manipulation, fund mismanagement, perjury and destruction of subpoenaed documents…” leaving office in disgrace.[lxxx]

Meanwhile, Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, went on a binge selling off federal lands to drilling and mining interests for pennies on the dollar. When asked if he was concerned about the environmental destruction of sensitive lands, he replied, “[M]y responsibility is to follow the Scriptures which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns.”[lxxxi] According to Watt’s fundamentalist dogma, any damage to the environment would be reversed when Jesus came back to Earth and “makes all things new.”

Reagan cut education funding, putting Bill Bennett in as Secretary of Education. Bennett was a big advocate of the so-called “school choice” movement that emerged in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v Board decision that ordered school desegregation. All-white private, religious, and charter schools started getting federal dollars, public schools had their funds cut, and Bennett later rationalized it all by saying, “If it were your sole purpose to reduce crime, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”[lxxxii]

The Labor Department had been created back in 1913 by progressive Republican President Taft,[lxxxiii] and Reagan installed former construction executive Ray Donovan as its head, the first anti-labor partisan to ever run the Department, a position he had to leave when he was indicted for fraud and grand larceny (the charges didn’t stick) related to Mafia associates he was in tight with. As the Washington Post noted when Donovan died:

“Carrying out Reagan’s conservative agenda, Mr. Donovan eased regulations for business, including Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules disliked by industry. He withdrew a rule requiring the labeling of hazardous chemicals in the workplace and postponed federal employment and training programs, equal opportunity employment measures, and a minimum-wage increase for service workers. His tenure also saw drastic cuts in the department’s budget and staff.”[lxxxiv]

That sort of thing happened in every federal agency throughout the Reagan and Bush presidencies; much of their neoliberal damage has yet to be undone.

Thus, by 1992 Americans were starting to wise up to Reagan’s scam.

Thousands of factories had closed, their production shipped overseas; working-class wages had stagnated since his first year in office while CEO salaries exploded from 29 times the average worker’s salary in 1978 to 129 times average worker wages in 1995 (they’re over 300 times worker wages today);[lxxxv] and union membership had dropped from a third of workers to around 15 percent (it’s around 6% of the private workforce today).[lxxxvi]

The Reagan/Bush administrations negotiated the neoliberal centerpiece NAFTA treaty (although they called it a “trade agreement” rather than a treaty because it couldn’t get past the constitutional requirement for a 2/3rds vote in the senate to approve all treaties) and wanted it signed the following year, in 1993.

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— Russia’s main goal for years has been to cripple NATO by getting US troops out of Germany. Putin called Trump this week (we wouldn’t have known except Russian media bragged about it) and apparently gave him his instructions; yesterday the Pentagon announced we’re pulling 5,000 troops out of Germany and putting massive tariffs on EU goods to further weaken NATO member nations. They’re toasting their success with champagne in the Kremlin and planning their strategy to take the Baltic states once the war against Ukraine is over.

— Thanks to six corrupt bought-off Republicans on the Supreme Court, Louisiana Republicans are colluding in broad daylight to rig this fall’s election and silence the voices of Black voters. Jeff Landry is one of the most corrupt governors in America, having been accused of accepting free flights and gifts, illegal use of campaign funds, and giving government jobs to top donors, among other things. Now he’s suspending the upcoming primaries (voting was already underway) so he and his cronies in the legislature can re-gerrymander the state to make sure the state will never again send a Black representative to Washington DC. Democracy Docket’s Marc Elias noted, “What is happening in Louisiana right now is both a redistricting power grab and a dry run for authoritarian election subversion this fall.” And this is just the beginning; with the six Republicans on the Court okaying new maps that shatter majority-Black districts, the Congressional Black Caucus is bracing for a major loss of members this fall and in 2028. John Roberts and his buddies on the Court claim that they’re not “seeing race” and that the problem of minority voters being victimized by Republican policies is long in the past; in fact it’s very, very real now and their and Landry’s actions prove it. Hypocrites and racist liars…

— The Trump regime is the most lawless in America’s history. The War Powers Act of 1973 requires two things: If the United States has come under attack or an attack is imminent, the president may order an immediate commencement of war-making against the attacker; when that happens, he then has 60 days to try to resolve the situation, but after that must seek approval from Congress to continue kinetic action. Trump has already broken that law: Iran represented no immediate threat to the US at all but he bombed them anyway. And now, as Democrats are joining Republicans in pretending he didn’t commit that crime and so are asking for the 60-day request for war authorization from Congress, Whiskey Pete Hegseth told senators yesterday that because our military isn’t currently shooting or bombing, “the clock is paused” and they don’t need to go to Congress. The law requires a cessation of hostilities within 60 days, and if blockading the Strait of Hormuz isn’t a hostile action then apparently the next step is for the Pentagon to declare that gravity is optional and wars only count when someone bothers to keep score. Meanwhile, ICE murders American citizens and ignores the 4th and 5th Amendments, the DOJ ignores court orders, Trump criminally impounds funds Congress had appropriated for Blue states, and the entire regime is in open and blatant violation of the Epstein Transparency Act. Hopefully, Democrats will find their spines and voices and hold these criminals to account once they acquire the power to do so, and begin shadow hearings in the meantime to inform the American people of Trump’s and his people’s lawlessness.

— Americans of all stripes and political affiliations agree: Data Centers are a plague. Big AI have been buying off politicians across the country, often even getting tax deferrals and free land as they burden local electric and water resources, all to increase the profits of a handful of morbidly rich AI oligarchs. Residents in the areas the tech bro oligarchs are eyeing are getting active, although a few well-placed “contributions” and “tips” to politicians often frustrate their efforts. Maine’s legislature, for example, passed a moratorium on the centers last month by a wide margin but then Governor Janet Mills, apparently feathering her nest for her upcoming retirement, vetoed the legislation. In other states it’s less obviously corrupt, but people are genuinely freaked out as AI transforms not just the physical landscape of America but the employment landscape as well. In Michigan, The New York Times reports: “In towns across the state, suspicions are still rife, sometimes far-fetched. Residents in different towns expressed worries about effects on fertility. Others worried the centers could end up as military targets, pointing to Iran’s strikes on data center infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. People in Michigan also pointed to two contracts between a data center project in Saline Township and the state’s main electric utility that were so heavily redacted that the state’s attorney general is challenging them in court. A special fast-track process was used to bypass public hearings. Even the signatures are blacked out.” AI is here and not going away, and Moore’s Law suggests many of these monster data centers will soon be scaled back, perhaps even bursting the AI bubble that keeps driving the stock market regardless of the Iran conflict. Keep an eye on this; it’s going to change the world our kids are inheriting in ways that are still unclear.

— The Trump grift is multigenerational. Uday and Qusay…er…Don Jr and Eric just jumped into the defense contracting business, hooking up with three new drone companies. Suspiciously, the companies all are bidding for or just got massive multi-million-dollar contracts with the Pentagon, with more to come. Remember when Republicans screamed about Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy “cashing in on the presidency” by licensing his name to a brand of beer? Or when Republicans held endless hearings, press conferences, and years of Fox “News” reports about Biden’s son making $5 million for sitting on the board of an energy company? They were pikers. The Trump Crime Family is the most corrupt first family in American history and hopefully their reign will be short-lived when Democrats get the power of impeachment back.

— Democracy around the world is under assault by rightwingers who get themselves elected and then flip their nations into autocracy and oligarchy. An estimated half of all the world’s democracies are under such an assault — including the United States — and Uganda is the most recent to go all in. President Yoweri Museveni says he wants to sign legislation that’s working its way through the Ugandan legislature that would criminalize opposition politicians, most types of reporting and opinion writing, and any group affiliated with foreign organizations. Russia, through diplomatic outreach and via their massive social media influence operations, has been pushing this sort of thing across the free world, and this bill is a virtual clone of Russian legislation that lets Putin imprison or even execute dissidents and reporters. And Trump, trying to help out his mentor and owner, has shut down Voice of America to make Putin’s job even easier.

— Joe Walsh UNLEASHES Tea Party smear machine on a Democrat fighting for us working people. Former Republican congressman Joe Walsh went on his podcast and spewed a vitriolic tirade against Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, calling him “despicable,” a “bullshitter,” even throwing around accusations like “anti-Semitic,” and then said he wouldn’t support him even if it helps keep a Republican in power. This from Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party bomb-thrower who built his career on outrage, division, and some of the ugliest rhetoric of the last decade. And let’s not rewrite history here: this is a guy who helped normalize the very politics that damaged our democracy. Yet when he decided to rebrand himself, Democrats and progressives said fine, come on in, we believe in a big tent. We gave him grace; I’ve even invited him onto my program several times. And now? Now he turns that same scorched-earth, character-assassination playbook on a real progressive who’s actually connecting with voters on the number one issue in this country, affordability. That’s not principle, that’s hypocrisy dripping with arrogance. Walsh doesn’t want a “big tent,” he wants a tent where he gets to decide who’s worthy. And when someone comes along with a message that resonates with working people, he panics and goes for the jugular. It’s the same old Tea Party venom, just dressed up in a different jersey. You don’t strengthen democracy by trashing candidates fighting for economic justice, you weaken it. And if that’s where Joe Walsh is going to stand, then he hasn’t changed nearly as much as he wants people to believe and will not be welcome on my show again until he publicly apologizes to us and Graham Platner.

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Maine just handed Democrats a wake-up call that they’d damn well better actually listen to this time.

Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign yesterday, leaving Marine veteran and oyster farmer Graham Platner as the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November.

The message Maine voters are frankly shouting is the same one I’ve been hearing from listeners on my radio/TV show for years and the same one that pollsters across the spectrum keep picking up across the country: people are sick and tired of mealy-mouthed corporate Democrats who run on focus-grouped slogans and govern like they’re scared of their own shadow. They want fighters.

Mills was Chuck Schumer’s hand-picked candidate, recruited by Democratic Party insiders because they thought the 78-year-old two-term governor would be the safest, most “electable” option against Susan Collins. What Schumer and the “insider Democrats” got instead — and deserved — was a 30-point shellacking.

Platner, who launched his campaign last August by naming “the oligarchy” and “the billionaires who pay for it” as the enemy, outraised Mills every single quarter, packed wildly enthusiastic town halls all over the state, and even earned Bernie Sanders’s endorsement along the way. He turned Mills’s establishment alignment into a major liability and thus pushed her out of the race a full five weeks before the primary.

That’s what happens when voters finally get a real choice: they want the real thing, not a compromising deal-maker taking money from corporations and billionaires like Republicans do. As then-President Harry Truman said on May 17, 1952:

“If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don’t want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign.”

And it matters that on roughly the same day Mills bowed out, the Congressional Progressive Caucus — just as fed up with moderate Democrats running the same losing playbook as voters are — rolled out its New Affordability Agenda, a ten-point legislative package aimed straight at the cost-of-living crisis that’s now crushing working families.

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It would make:
— Prescription drugs cheaper by establishing a government program to sell generic drugs at a discount, cutting the price of a vial of insulin from $300 to $50;
— Utilities cheaper by cracking down on for-profit utilities overcharging consumers, saving the average family $500 a year;
— Gas cheaper by charging big oil companies a tax on extra profits from the war, then refunding that money to consumers. If oil stays at $100 a barrel, most families would get $324 back;
— Childcare cheaper by guaranteeing no family pays more than 7% of its income – under $10 a day for most families;
— Housing cheaper by building millions of new homes, offering every first-time homeowner $20,000 in downpayment assistance, and expanding rental assistance;
— Groceries cheaper by cracking down on big grocers who fix prices and on companies that abuse seed patents to make farming more expensive;
— Time off cheaper by guaranteeing every worker two weeks of paid vacation time;
— Ban ‘Surveillance Pricing,’ where companies use personal data to raise prices with AI;
— Put money in pockets by requiring companies to pay double wages for overtime, as opposed to the current time-and-a-half standard; and
— Abolish Super PACs so billionaires can’t buy more policies that make stuff more expensive.

New polling from Data for Progress found that every single one of those proposals is supported by close to 60% of Republican voters. Among Democrats it pushes into the 80% range.

That’s not a “leftist” agenda. That’s a genuine populist agenda that works for the actual American electorate, and Greg Casar, Ilhan Omar, AOC, Mark Pocan, Ro Khanna, and the rest of the Progressive Caucus deserve real credit for putting it on the table.

Some of us have been ringing this bell since the 1990s. Back when Bill Clinton was triangulating his way through welfare reform and NAFTA, I was telling readers that we were watching the Democratic Party gut its own coalition for a handful of cocktail-party invitations from Wall Street.

As I laid out in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America and on the air for over two decades, when Clinton embraced Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1992 and Obama maintained it through his eight years in office, the Democratic Party took a fatal turn to the right.

“End welfare as we know it.” “The era of big government is over.” NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, bailing out the banks and hobnobbing with their CEOs at Davos while throwing the homeowners those banksters had defrauded out on the street, sucking up to Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Defense, defending Netanyahu no matter how many war crimes he commits.

Then nominating Hillary Clinton on a platform that tried to tell working-class voters that things were basically fine, right before Donald Trump ran ads in the Rust Belt about NAFTA and how nobody in Washington gave a damn about them. The post-1992 neoliberal Democratic Party didn’t lose because it was too progressive: it lost because it kept refusing to be progressive at all.

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Meanwhile, look at what the Republicans have actually done with the power voters keep handing them. They’ve:
— Cut taxes on billionaires and corporations so dramatically that the national debt just officially crossed 100% of GDP, the highest peacetime level since the years right after World War II.
— Rigged elections through aggressive voter purges and partisan gerrymandering, with help from a Supreme Court that just this week further gutted the Voting Rights Act.
— Cheered on foreign wars, including the “magnificently stupid” current Iran war Platner himself has denounced, while running interference for the daily war crimes happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon.
— Allowed the Trump family to turn the presidency into a multi-billion-dollar grift machine of meme coins, crypto launches, stablecoins, and foreign payoffs while millions of Americans skip prescription doses to make rent.
— Kept the federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25, where it’s been stuck since 2009, and even went to this corrupt Supreme Court to kill Joe Biden’s student debt relief.
— Taken hundreds of millions from the fossil fuel industry while heat domes, hurricanes, and wildfires are killing thousands of Americans — most recently children in Texas —every single year.
— Taken millions more from the gun industry while terrified schoolkids hide under their desks.
— Hijacked Christianity, pushing a twisted version that Jesus would’ve flipped tables over, while hustling for huckster televangelists, performatively demanding mandatory school prayer, Ten Commandments postings in every classroom, and Whiskey Pete pitching prayer every weekend in every barracks.
— Deployed armed, masked thugs to intimidate and murder American citizens while building a massive series of concentration camps across the country.

That’s the record American voters across the political spectrum need to know about, and Democrats should be shouting from the rafters. A wishy-washy Democrat saying “well, we’ll try, but we really don’t want to piss off the Republicans by impeaching Trump or Clarence Thomas” — like we saw in 2024 — is never again going to work.

Maine’s Democrats saw a guy who’d actually served three tours in Iraq, who runs a small business on the working waterfront, who talks the way they talk, and who isn’t afraid to say out loud that the people robbing them are the billionaire class and the Republican shills they own.

The lesson for the DNC, DCCC, the DSCC, and every damn consultant who’s suggested running on an anodyne “don’t make waves” agenda without naming who’s screwing everyday Americans is clear: the New Affordability Agenda isn’t just good policy, it’s also good politics.

It tells voters exactly who’s stealing from them and offers concrete steps progressive candidates will fight to actually deliver. That’s the formula Bernie Sanders has been pushing for three decades (and did for 11 years weekly on my radio program), the formula AOC and Zohran Mamdani just rode to victory in New York, and the formula Platner just used to blow Janet Mills out of the water.

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So, reach out to your Democratic member of Congress and senators and tell them to sign onto the New Affordability Agenda. Tell them you want fighters, not neoliberal wusses.

If you’re in Maine, help Graham Platner finish the job and send Susan Collins home in November. And if you’re anywhere else, find the populist progressives in your state’s primary and back them, too, or sign up to run yourself.

Maine just showed the rest of the country what’s possible when Democrats finally stop wimping out and trying to appease Republicans. Voters want candidates like Graham Platner who’ll take names and kick ass.

It’s now on the rest of us to follow their lead.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Change They Can’t Ignore”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that:

“President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said... In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. …

“For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’”

So, Putin — who Trump took orders from for a full 90 minutes yesterday — and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. Or at least a revisit to the GOP’s infamous Nixon-era crises of the 1970s, Reagan’s “Black Monday” 22% market crash, Bush’s 2008 “Great Recession,” and Trump’s 2020 massive botched-pandemic-response economic melt-down.

Trump and his people didn’t bother to say one word to average Americans — no press conference or warning — but they sure made certain that their billionaire buddies are informed.

And, of course, they’re not at all worried by this; recessions and depressions are when the morbidly rich like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make their greatest fortunes. Businesses are failing, stock prices collapsing, and people are losing their homes, all fantastic buying opportunities for wealthy, cash-rich predators investors.

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For example, when a handful of greedy Wall Street CEOs crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.

The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594. No bankers were ever prosecuted.

While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.

Working-class people were desperately selling their homes and unloading the stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all of the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.

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As the economy recovered, rich people who’d bought stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.

Then they did it again 10 years later!

The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get even richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

As the market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, average Americans, now out of work, were again selling their homes and stocks at a loss just to buy food and medicine. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.

March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!

Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.

And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

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Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.

American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion of that is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.

Which is why working-class Americans and our media should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of GOP policy choices that get repeated whenever a Republican is in the White House — ten of the last eleven recessions happened when a Republican was president — and this one is being engineered right now in plain sight.

Republican deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. Tax breaks for the rich force cuts to government support for poor and middle class Americans. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.

And this downturn could easily be the biggest one of our lifetimes, a singular achievement the Trump Crime Family will profit from massively, along with their billionaire cronies. As CNN reports, “About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia” and Asia is melting down from a lack of Middle Eastern oil. It’s hitting the rest of the world, too:

“The Middle East ships about 25% of the world’s polypropylene and 20% of polyethylene, two of the most-used plastics. It also accounts for a quarter of the world’s sulphur and 15% of its fertilizer.”

Not to mention a fifth of the world’s oil, most of the world’s helium, necessary to run MRI machines and make precision chips, and other crucial commodities. As Martin Wolf wrote for yesterday’s Financial Times:

“Fifty per cent of the world’s seaborne trade in sulphur passes through the Strait of Hormuz. So does 34 per cent of trade in crude oil, 29 per cent of liquefied petroleum gas, 19 per cent of liquefied natural gas, 19 per cent of refined oil products, 13 per cent of chemicals, including fertilisers, and nearly 10 per cent of aluminium. This is a chokepoint of the world economy.“

The oil shock has become so bad in Asia that, CNN notes, “Several major petrochemical producers, including South Korea’s Yeochun and PCS in Singapore, have declared ‘force majeure,’” meaning they can no longer honor their contracts to supply their customers because of circumstances out of their control.

And now it’s starting to show up here in the US in ways that go far beyond just the price at the pump.

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Some are wondering if Trump’s efforts to bring down the world economy — which are explicitly helping Russia — are because Putin told him to do it.

That’s possible; our joining Netanyahu in illegally bombing Iran has also been a big boon to Putin’s regime, both in justifying his similarly illegal bombing of Ukraine and in jacking up world demand for (and the price of) Russian oil, which Trump has conveniently dropped sanctions on.

But it’s just as likely that this is simply the same type of stupid decision-making that has caused Trump to run every one of his dozens of companies except those subsidized by Russian or Middle Eastern money straight into the ground. Or it’s a two-fer, that benefits both American billionaires and Putin.

However it came about, buckle up. Hegseth’s pathetic performance before Congress yesterday tells us explicitly that the Trump regime has no plan to work out a peace deal with Iran any time soon.

While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year for the other 99% rest of us.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Tip-off!”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Donald Trump isn’t just breaking norms, he’s running a live experiment on the limits of American power. Each move is a test: How far can a president go? What laws and how much of the Constitution can be ignored? And, most importantly, will anyone actually stop him?

It took the King of England to remind Congress that their job is to restrain a president, not cheer him on no matter what. Charles III said:

“The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”

King Charles was essentially begging Congress to restrain Donald Trump’s imperial overreach, the most glaring example of which is his starting a war with Iran without congressional approval and in violation of both the US Constitution, the 1973 War Powers Act, and the Geneva Convention.

It’s a lesson America first lost touch with when President Harry Truman got us into the Korean War without Congressional authorization, was amplified by LBJ and Nixon in Vietnam and Reagan in Granada, and has since led through a series of modern presidential actions straight to Trump joining Netanyahu to bomb Iran without Congress, provocation, or legal basis.

Both parties have been complicit in this, generally in support of their own presidents while questioning the actions of presidents of the other party, but the actions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — and Obama’s failure to respond to them — most directly led to Trump’s excesses.

George W. Bush came into office wanting to start a war with Iraq as a strategy to get himself re-elected in 2004 and “have a successful presidency.” In 1999, when Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz to pen the first draft of Bush’s “autobiography,” A Charge To Keep.

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“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004. He told Baker that Bush said:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Cheney, meanwhile, was in a world of trouble because of a huge asbestos bet he’d made as CEO of Halliburton in 1998. The company was facing possible bankruptcy.

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In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the troubled company and the year after that, as Bush’s now-Vice President, Halliburton subsidiary KBR suddenly received one of the first no-bid no-ceiling (no accountability and no limit on how much they could receive) multi-billion-dollar military contracts that arguably rescued the company.

Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 for their own selfish purposes, the law and public good be damned.

— Bush was unpopular and seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father’s corrupt appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v Gore lawsuit that made him president; he wanted a war that would give him legitimacy and the aura of leadership.

— Cheney’s company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan War no-bid contracts helped turn around Halliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world’s largest defense contractors today, adding a fortune to Cheney’s family’s holding of Halliburton stock.

Under Bush’s and Cheney’s command, American forces committed numerous war crimes — including torture, murder, slaughter of civilians including children, and kidnapping/rendering to “black sites” — that earned America universal condemnation. Our reputation was damaged, but, even worse, the precedent of an untouchable, unaccountable presidency was established.

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That could have been stopped by Congress, but the body failed; the crime was then compounded when Barack Obama came into office in January, 2009 with a 257-198 Democratic majority in the House and a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. They had real political power, but instead of holding these two liars and war criminals to account, President Obama said, when asked if he was going to prosecute them:

“I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

When he and Democrats in Congress took that position — much like House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying this Sunday on Fox “News” that impeaching Trump is not a priority if they take power in this November’s election — they let Bush and Cheney off the hook and thus pretty much guaranteed that Trump would overreach and commit war crimes, as he has done.

After all, if Obama and congressional Democrats let Bush and Cheney get away with what everybody in America knew was a series of deadly lies that cost us both lives and treasure, why would Trump think that any Democrat would ever try to hold him accountable for the same thing?

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Which is exactly why it’s so important for Democrats to abandon appeasement and hold Trump accountable for his many crimes in office — from taking bribes and selling pardons to tearing down part of the White House to bombing Iran — if they regain the power of the subpoena and impeachment this fall.

Instead of telling Trump in advance that he’ll skate just like Reagan, Bush, and Cheney did, Jeffries and Schumer should be loudly proclaiming that there will be accountability.

This sort of behavior — by presidents of both parties — has to stop. It’s wrong, it’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, and it destroys the world’s confidence in America as a moral force.

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Taking on Trump is also good politics.

A recent Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll found 55% of all voters support impeaching Trump, with especially strong backing among Democrats. One-in-five of Trump’s own voters want him impeached and at least 85 members of the House are on record for holding him accountable. A Quinnipiac University poll found that fully 95% of Democrats support prosecuting Trump on federal charges.

A hereditary king praising restraints on executive authority before the U.S. Congress was both historically ironic and politically elegant: King Charles III was reminding Congress not to tolerate a man trying to become the kind of ruler our Founders rejected. As he pointed out, free nations only survive as free when executive power is answerable to Congress, the people, and the law.

Democrats damn well better be paying attention.

At some point, this stops being just about Trump. It becomes about whether the United States still believes in accountability at all. Because if the answer to every abuse of power is still “nothing,” then the destruction of American democracy isn’t just continuing, it’s succeeding.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump Ain’t Getting Stopped”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

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Gallup just found that only 10% of Americans approve of the job Republicans in Congress are doing, with 86% actively disapproving of the GOP’s behavior.

Turns out, there’s a reason.

Yesterday on my nationally syndicated radio/TV/SiriusXM/YouTube program a fellow called to ask how long I’d been running my contest. It started more than 20 years ago, around the time I helped start Air America Radio. Here’s the question:

“Name one piece of major legislation that was created by Republicans since Reagan’s presidency, passed the House and Senate with majority Republican votes, and signed into law by a Republican president, whose major beneficiary is the average working person.”

To this day, nobody’s identified a single piece of major legislation and thus won the autographed book that’s the prize.

Meanwhile, since 1981 Democrats have passed the Family and Medical Leave Act; Earned Income Tax Credit expansions; Children’s Health Insurance Program; Affordable Care Act; Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act; American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; Every Student Succeeds Act; American Rescue Plan Act; Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act; Inflation Reduction Act; PACT Act, and dozens of others.

Which raises the question: Why have Republicans avoided doing anything at all to help average working people for over 40 years?

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As I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, the genesis of the situation goes back to 1974, when William F. Buckley’s millionaire brother and Senator James Buckley joined a lawsuit with former Senator Eugene McCarthy to challenge the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA, passed in the wake of the Nixon and Agnew bribery scandals) limiting campaign contributions to $1000 from an individual and $50,000 for a candidate self-financing their campaign (as Buckley had done).

Buckley’s suit claimed the money he might want to put into a future campaign was his own and he should be able to use it however he wanted.

Just two years earlier, Nixon had put Lewis Powell (author of the infamous 1971 Powell Memo, which was that era’s Project 2025) on the Supreme Court, and Powell got to working on his colleagues, resulting in the 1976 Buckley v Valeo decision. It echoed Powell’s Memo, saying that money spent on politics was the same thing as “free speech” and thus protected by the First Amendment, blowing up those nasty donation limits.

Two years later, Powell himself authored the 1978 First National Bank v Bellotti decision that doubled-down on the “money is free speech” argument and extended it from humans to corporations as well.

The result was that the 1980 Reagan campaign was suddenly awash in oil industry money, because he’d promised to sabotage Jimmy Carter’s Solar Bank program that would have had America producing 20% of our electricity from solar by the year 2000.

When Clarence Thomas — then himself on the take from rightwing billionaires — became the Court’s deciding vote in Citizens United in 2010, the doors to functionally unlimited campaign and dark money contributions from both billionaires and corporations were blown open.

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Which explains the answers to other questions that often come up on my program:

Q. Why do Republicans fight free college and ending student debt when our experience with the GI Bill after WWII found that for every $1 we invest in educating people our nation got $7 in return, as well as making America the science leader of the late 20th century?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the banking industry, which makes billions in profits from student loans that are almost entirely risk-free because — thanks to legislation signed by George W. Bush — they can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.

Q. Why do Republicans fight every effort to have a national healthcare system like every other democracy in the world has, even though it would save tens of thousands of lives a year, lengthen the average American lifespan, and cost us around half of what we pay for healthcare today?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the health insurance industry, which makes billions in profits from denying coverage to people, even though 78 million Americans have inadequate or no insurance and a national system would save the country an estimated half-billion dollars a year. As Wendell Potter notes, “In 2024, seven big insurers posted $71.3 billion in profits and paid their [seven] CEOs more than $146 million.”

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Q. Why do Republicans sabotage green programs designed to get America off our dependence on fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are destroying our atmosphere, our children’s future, and cause tens of thousands of cancers and millions of cases of asthma and other disease cases every year?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the fossil fuel industry, which makes billions in profits every year and recycles some of that back to the Party. In 2024 the world’s largest, most polluting companies recording an estimated $583 billion in profits, marking a 68% increase since 2019 in part because of their investment in buying American Republican politicians.

Q. Why do Republicans fight breaking up monopolies, even though the average American family pays around $5000 a year more for goods and services than do the citizens of most other democracies that don’t allow monopolies and oligopolies?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant, monopolistic companies, as I lay out in horrifying detail in The Hidden History of American Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream (foreword by Ralph Nader). Every time a Democratic president tries to take on the monopolies — as Biden most recently did by hiring Lina Kahn to run the FTC — Republicans support lawsuits that postpone the breakups until a Republican president can fire the FTC head, install a corporate toady, and drop the case.

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Q. Why do Republicans fight letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices, even though every other developed nation does it and Americans typically pay two to ten times more for the same medicines?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the pharmaceutical industry, which has poured hundreds of millions into the party for decades. Big Pharma’s obscene profits depend on Americans paying the highest drug prices in the world, so Republicans consistently oppose any reforms that would let Medicare use its buying power to bring costs down.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose expanding Social Security benefits and protecting the program by lifting the payroll tax cap on billionaires, even though millions of seniors rely on it as their primary income and lifting the cap would make the program solvent for the next 75 years?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from Wall Street, which has long dreamed of privatizing Social Security so giant investment firms can skim management fees from the trillions in the Social Security Trust Fund. Every dollar kept in the public Social Security system is a dollar the financial industry can’t turn into profit.

Q. Why do Republicans battle against universal paid family leave and paid sick leave, even though every other advanced democracy guarantees workers time to care for a newborn, a sick spouse, or themselves and paid sick leave helps prevent the spread of disease?

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A. Because the GOP is on the take from low-pay corporate employers who want labor as cheap and disposable as possible. Paid leave shifts a tiny share of corporate wealth back to workers, so the Chamber of Commerce and big business and its political allies pour millions into Republican coffers and campaigns to block it.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose raising the minimum wage, even though productivity has soared for decades while wages have stagnated and the corporate owners are richer than at any time in world history?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from giant retail chains, fast-food corporations, and other low-wage employers whose profits depend on paying people less than a living wage. Keeping wages low forces us taxpayers to subsidize their workers through food stamps, Medicaid, and housing aid while their morbidly rich executives pocket the difference.

Q. Why do Republicans fight food assistance programs like SNAP and universal free school lunches, even though childhood hunger damages learning, health, and lifetime earning potential and research proves these programs are among the most efficient anti-poverty investments any government can make?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from billionaires and low-wage corporations that depend on keeping wages so low workers still need public help to feed their families. SNAP and school lunch programs expose the truth that millions of Americans are working full-time jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. Rather than force employers to raise wages, Republicans would rather let children go hungry and blame the poor for being poor.

Q. Why do Republicans fight stronger gun safety laws supported by large majorities of Americans, even including things as anodyne as universal background checks and red-flag laws?

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A. Because the GOP is on the take from the gun industry and its lobbying arm, the NRA, which make fortunes every time a new round of Republican-pushed fear drives firearm sales. Dead children in classrooms are the tragic collateral damage to this business model built on lies about the Second Amendment and political bribery.

Q. Why do Republicans oppose cracking down on tax havens and making billionaires pay what they owe, even though it would reduce deficits, pay down our national debt, and fund schools, roads, and healthcare?

A. Because the GOP is on the take from the billionaires, hedge funds, and multinational corporations that bankroll their campaigns. If you add up the tax cuts for the rich by Reagan, Bush, and Trump they equal more than our entire national debt of $38 trillion, meaning all that money — that we pay a trillion dollars a year in interest on that could instead fund a national healthcare system, free college, and an end to homelessness — was borrowed in our name by the GOP to give to the Zuckerbergs, Musks, and Bezos’ of the world.

Q. Why do Republicans so frequently use hate and fear — from Willy Horton to Trump’s anti-trans ads to hysteria about bathrooms — to win political campaigns, and why do billionaires and corporations fund such advertising?

A. Because such type of campaigning has such a powerful emotional load it causes people to forget how the GOP has been screwing them for the past half-century.

Thus, we discover that the mystery of modern Republican politics isn’t really a mystery at all.

When a party consistently blocks cheaper medicine, better wages, paid leave, affordable college, clean energy, antitrust enforcement, and healthcare that works, it’s not because those ideas are unpopular or unworkable: it’s because they threaten the obscene profits of the industries and the billionaires writing the checks.

Until we overturn these obscene, corrupt SCOTUS rulings, get big money out of politics, and make Congress answerable to citizens instead of donors, the GOP will remain what it has become since the Reagan Revolution: not a political party with ideas to improve America and working people, but a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporations and billionaires while Americans die young and remain uneducated, underfed, and unhoused.

Louise’s Daily Song: “They Don’t Hear You!”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United.

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The attempted shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner Saturday night shouldn’t surprise us. Not only does America have the world’s most active small-arms industry that essentially controls the GOP (the reporters got a taste of what American — and only American — schoolkids experience every few months from their “realistic” active shooter drills), but we also host the world’s largest and most profitable hate-amplification industry.

Algorithms that amplify hate and division in order to “increase engagement” have made Mark Zuckerberg into one of the richest people on the planet, complete with a super-yacht and a doomsday bunker estate in Hawaii; Elon Musk’s X has turned into a sewer of Nazi-style rhetoric while Musk himself has posted, according to The Washington Post, nakedly white supremacist slogans and statements over 850 times just in the past seven months.

The Republican Party writ large has also benefitted from all this, since it was reinvented mid-20th century by Nixon’s racist Southern Strategy and Reagan’s embrace of “states’ rights” as the party of Christian white male supremacy. (The last four Black Republicans in the US House of Representatives are ending their political careers this year.)

Because every rightwing movement in history has been founded on hate and/or xenophobia, the openly neo-Confederate MAGA movement was simply the logical end-point of this turn the Party took a half-century ago. History shows that when the right wants to seize power, it reaches for the oldest weapon in politics: teach people to fear and then hate their neighbors, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy.

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Finally, the billionaire class and the massive, monopolistic corporations that made them rich benefit from the hate industry because when working-class people are mobilized to hate each other based on race, religion, gender (and gender identity), nationality, or political affiliation they’re far less likely to organize together to demand union rights, benefits, healthcare, education, and/or better wages.

Some even argue that the current state of GOP corruption, billionaire greed, and societal hate in America proves that democracy has run its course. Oddly, most arguing that are the billionaires themselves, or the lickspittle “dark enlightenment philosophers” they celebrate and fund.

Billionaire Peter Theil famously wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and the CEO of his company Palantir recently released an arguably neo-fascist 22-point manifesto claiming that America must resist “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism” and — without a trace of irony about today’s billionaire subculture that’s working to capture our government and crush worker’s movements and unions — that “certain cultures and indeed subcultures” are “regressive and harmful.”

There’s actually a long history for this antidemocratic worldview.

Plato himself argued that democracy would always ultimately lead to tyranny because democratic rule could so easily be co-opted by authoritarians using the tools of democracy itself. Karl Popper rebutted this extensively in 1945, arguing that democracies must become “intolerant of intolerance,” essentially putting limits (like the German people have done for themselves) on “free speech” when that speech is being used to undermine and ultimately destroy a democracy.

The European option would run afoul of our First Amendment, so America must come up with a different way to deal with the hate-industrial complex. There are a few options.

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While corporations will argue that they are “persons” protected by the First Amendment (an argument I rebut extensively in my new book Who Killed the American Dream: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told) and will say that their algorithms that favor outrage, hate, and division are merely corporate “free speech,” it should still be possible to regulate these bits of computer code.

I’m not proposing that people lose their right to speak online. The real issue is whether giant social media corporations should have the unlimited right to use their top-secret algorithms to pour gasoline on hate, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, and political violence just because outrage keeps people clicking and that drives engagement/ad-views and thus profits.

That’s not free speech in any meaningful human sense: it’s just a democracy-destroying business model.

Thus, one obvious reform is to separate hosting speech from amplifying it. If somebody wants to post something vile but lawful, that’s allowed under the First Amendment. But when a corporation’s software algorithm identifies that vile content as profit-promoting and shoves it into millions of feeds, that’s no longer passive hosting: it’s active promotion. And active promotion can be regulated.

Another fix is to require transparency. Make these companies openly disclose what their algorithms reward. Do they boost rage reactions, conspiracy content, fear, tribal conflict, and endless doom-scrolling just because it increases ad revenue for their billionaire owners? Let independent researchers audit the systems so the public can see whether hate is being engineered for profit behind the curtain and use public shame to discourage it.

And finally, give social media users real choice. Break up the social media monopolies. Require a simple chronological feed, for example, and an easy opt-out from manipulation-based recommendations, along with a legal duty of care when platforms knowingly drive people toward extremism or violence.

You still get free speech; what corporations lose is the right to use the invisible part of their machines to poison our minds, our children’s minds, and our democracy for money.

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None of this deals with the problem of rightwing billionaires acquiring massive media platforms and then requiring their employees to also spin the news in ways that are anti-democracy and pro-billionaire.

But reversing Reagan’s 1983 decision to largely abandon our anti-trust laws and his 1987 decision to abandon the Fairness Doctrine could go a long way toward mitigating the damage Australian-billionaire-owned Fox “News” and others have done to America.

Combine these steps with rational gun control and a re-commitment to teaching civics and critical thinking (as several European countries have done and we did before Reagan gutted federal education spending) and there’s a good chance America can rise again from the ashes of the hate and violence that today’s conservative movement and billionaire subculture have imposed on us.

The choice before us is stark. We can continue letting rightwing billionaires, monopolists, gun merchants, and hate-profiteers pit Americans against each other while they strip wealth and power from working people, or we can remember the oldest lesson of democracy: when ordinary people refuse to be divided, no oligarch or billionaire can stand against them.

Tag, we’re it!

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Hate-Industrial-Complex Marches On”

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My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. And what we can do about it today.