It’s a long story of Americans adoring the “life-styles of the rich and famous!”
While YOU were reading People Magazine, flirting with fascism and voting for hate, the “rich and famous” Epstein Class of billionaires were UP TO NO GOOD doing the following:
raping your daughters;
giving up secrets to foreign adversaries (blackmail);
Friday May 29th I watched Katy Tur as "liberal" guest on Bill Maher, sitting next to her was Kevin McCarthy former speaker of the house.
Kevin,l as is custom for right wingers,filibustered and dominated the conversation, spouting bullshit rationalizations, Katy as is typical for liberals sat there like a deer in the headlights.. This goes on every week, with right wing filibuster and liberal guests being run over.
What's with the liberal mentality? No wonder we are in deep shit., If you can't fight, you are going to get your ass whipped.
There are liberals who don't shrink from the fight, like Mike Nellis, Cenk Uygur, Stephanie Miller, etc. etc. but Maher doesn't put them on any more--Since Covid forced him out of his studio, he's become a libertarian jerkwad.
Bullshit. I watched the same show. Katy Tur did not get flustered, shrink or back down. She held her own throughout the show.
McCarthy talked a lot, but he did not dominate. He spouted gibberish about why January 6 occurred, and how the 'weaponized' Biden DOJ victimized him by gathering his Jan 2021 cellphone data. Sounds like he was ready to make a claim on the slush fund. Didn't mention that he called Trump numerous times to beg him to call off the rioters.
Katy Tur immediately clarified that the 'data' was numbers called & times, NOT names, NOT conversations. She did not let him play the victim.
You seem to have a very outdated mindset of
angry GOP men = right, vs smart liberal females = weak. But remember who quit his job as House Leader because he couldn't take the pressure or control his caucus. Then remember Nancy Pelosi...strong, confident, still standing despite all the haters.
I didn't say she shrank or backed down, but McCarthy did dominate the conversation, and that was the point. It happens with all all "conservative" host, . Rachel Maddow even had to stand. up,to get her point in.
My point is that Katy could have and should have jumped in and corrected him, and did what he did filibuster and take over the conversation, but liberals are always polite, and that works to our disadvantage.
I was waiting for Katy to correct McCarthy's bullshit, but when she started he wold interrupt and go in a diatribe again.
Liberals have to learn to fight fire with fire.To hell with his nice guy shit.
Bunkers for billionaires deserves maximum exposure, but is getting none. Zuckerberg is building a luxury bunker in Hawaii. Medium.com (a paywall) has run articles on billionaire bunkers, nothing in Meidas, KOS or any other "liberal" pub or site.
America has clearly lost its way. We have been deteriorating for the last half-century. While we can point to the ideology of Republicans as consistent with the change, Democratic presidents have done little to turn things around. Citizens United should have been Obama's #1 priority. It wasn't. In my mind, the only thing that separates the two parties is that Democrats devote more time and energy to governing, whereas Republicans devote more time and energy to ruling. Ruling is so much easier and wealth-enhancing for the rulers.
Put differently, America today reflects a widespread moral failure, and too few people seem motivated to repent our sins of commission and omission, reform our ways, and restore our democracy. It sure seems like this November is where we either embrace fascism or restore democracy and bring this current regime to justice.
Henry David Thoreau: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root”. Once again, Thom absolutely nails it. Too many politicians across the board knowingly and loudly take swings at the fringe results of the abuse du jour while steadfastly ignoring its cause. The root isn’t whatever “ism” has manifested, it’s concentrated wealth and the attendant concentration of power. Today’s wealthy powerful utterly own one major political party and utterly cow, and own, a huge proportion of the other. Bernie, AOC, Warren, and more, and a raft of new candidates, know better. They deserve our enthusiastic support. The corporate, AIPAC-owned others are an impediment we can’t afford or justify.
I'm glad to see Thom make this connection. Corporations are entities designed to take ever-greater profits at the expense of everything else, until the world and everything in it have been stripped of their value. They are like doomsday machines with no off switch.
But it should be noted that fascism and communism are not precise opposites; fascism is a racist political philosophy supporting imperial capitalism. Communism is an socialist economic philosophy supported by a dictatorship that could be fascist, but usually isn't.
As for the Supreme Court, let's get rid of it. They will always have a bias, there is never any impartiality and giving nine unelected people that much power can only lead to ruin. Let lower court rulings stand. There are enough of them so that rulings are averaged out (hopefully).
The Republicans recognized a salient truth, one ignored by the Democrats. The ruth was voiced by LBJ . He described a political tactic used to distract the working class: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you".
It's just blacks, but as Trump has demonstrated, minorities of every class, religious, economic, social, sexual and immigrants.
The same ugly part of humanity that a certain little corporal with a toothbrush mustache use to rise to power.
That butt hole James Carville and mainstream Dmes, and many liberals as well, want us to belive that it is the economy stupid, while the Republicans press on with the culture war
In Texas thare is the Matthew 25 Christian, Talarico, running for Senate, he is being attacked from the right, by the likes of Stephen Miller, as a soy boy, and even transgendered, and sadly such attacks will work in Texas.
Texas runs on toxic masculinity, and it is not restricted to white men either, Latino's are very dominant in that sphere.
Our Fascist Corporate Overlords [FCO] "are" latter-day wannabe King Leopold II's for whom we gather and extract the equivalents of rubber, palm oil, and ivory as working stiffs.
That is, until the robots come for our careers en masse, at which point we become 100% expendable in the workforce. And that's why DT wants mail-order firearms. So we can take it out on one another.
FCO's are turning the nation into the equivalent of the Congo Free State as it was in Conrad's time.
It could be that we've never really been better than a "Heart of Darkness" from the get-go.
In 1914, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned us that vast fortunes are inconsistent with democracy, and later attributed to him is the statement,“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
Despite that warning, then, as Thom's article states "Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression." What has happened since the Reagan years seems like a replay. Will it take another cataclysmic event before enough of us wake up and put things right?
The Viet Nam war, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War and now the Iran War were created because a sitting president wanted to get re elected to a second term. They were hugely expensive Wars. They created enough drama and false patriotism to get them re elected.
We the people were being manipulated into paying for these wars with dead American soldiers and our tax dollars. But, a lot of us were aware of the factual deceptive motives
behind these devastating wars. This is my impression and I am not a historian.
We the people are constantly subjected to false narratives by politicians for their ulterior motives. Is it possible that the United States has become too big and diverse for sanity?
Those of us who are not racists and who are happy to be middle class and also would like to protect victims of racism and poverty, would like to have our own country and stop murdering wars.
It’s why Republicans defund education. As Trump said, “I LOVE the uneducated!” If you have had civics and don’t know how democracy is supposed to work, how will you know when it isn’t being run correctly. As Commies and Fascists have done for decades, if they can destroy a population’s trust in democracy, it makes them consider other forms. Putin destroyed the faith of Russians in their fledgling democracy, so they would consider his East Germany form of fascism. How do you do that? Friction strategy. As Reagan, Bush and Trump have done, you cut staff, cut funding, add barriers, put incompetent people (or worse)in charge. Thats what Trump and DOGE did on steroids, as strategized in Project 2025. The result is dysfunction, poor services, delays, mistakes and cries of “what am I paying for.” The obvious Republican response is “we can fix it, just give us total control (without oversight or transparency) so we can privatize it all to our corporate donors.” It’s a con.
If you really want to make America great again, you MUST go back to the policies, processes, regulations, laws and tax codes odes that MADE it that way. As an organizational behavior and quality improvement practitioner, I have been driven facts and history. Truths: “Using the SAME process, but expecting different results is a sign of insanity!” The opposite is also true: Using a DIFFERENT process, but expecting the same results (such as an affordable middle class) is also a sign of insanity! Since 1981, Republicans have drastically changed the processes (just as Hoover and Coolidge did), but continue to lie and tell us it will “trickle down” to the middle class. It never has-it never will. It is a flawed economic model.
This may seem unrelated but I cannot help thinking about the upcoming “celebration” of the 250th birthday of the country. May I suggest an antidote and a counter way of celebrating by the rest of us:
Have each state create a local large gathering. After all, it was 13 very disparate colonies that somehow managed to collaborate around a common cause to create a very delicate union. Let us celebrate our “federation” and remember that heritage of finding commonality amid difference.
“We the thirteen colonies join to establish a union”
I hated Reagan since he was governor of California. And when he gutted the air traffic controllers union & kicked the mentally ill out of hospitals we could see where this was going & now it's here in fucking spades!!!!
Years ago I said there were super wealthy people who we didn't know that were running the show & everybody laughed at me! Well, they're not laughing now! And while I got the last laugh I'm not laughing I'm pissed off.
Those ga-zillionaires better worry. When the Russian serfs revolted they killed the Czar & his family & took over the wealth of the country. Yeah, yeah I know they installed an authoritarian government & the serfs just had a new master aka Comrade but it still happened & their super wealthy had to flee. So our super wealthy better watch out too. Piss off enough people & your precious Ivory Towers will come down too!!!
Because the Billionaires, the Very Wealthy, have carefully rigged everything to enable Capitalism to do it's #1 job, to redistribute as much wealth as possible up from the 99% to the 1%.
A primary culprit is no taxes on unrealized capital gains.
There is a good argument for this, to encourage and reward investment and saving. But the gold old Law of the Golden Mean applies, as it does almost everywhere.
Too little is bad, too much is bad, enough is good.
Now the Billionaires own est. $8 trillion in assets, everyone needs enough to live with dignity, nobody needs billions or hundreds of millions. I would propose a 5% annual tax on assets over $100 million, including unrealized capital gains. Elon Musk with est. $800 billion would pay about $40 billion a year more than he does. The billionaires collectively would pay about $400 billion more than they do now.
Thank you, Thom, for remembering how we got here!
It’s a long story of Americans adoring the “life-styles of the rich and famous!”
While YOU were reading People Magazine, flirting with fascism and voting for hate, the “rich and famous” Epstein Class of billionaires were UP TO NO GOOD doing the following:
raping your daughters;
giving up secrets to foreign adversaries (blackmail);
stealing your future by moving jobs off-shore;
cheating on their taxes by
hiding their illicit money off-shore; and now
stealing your elections!
It’s too bad you were NOT paying attention then!
“Woke” is NOT the problem now!
Friday May 29th I watched Katy Tur as "liberal" guest on Bill Maher, sitting next to her was Kevin McCarthy former speaker of the house.
Kevin,l as is custom for right wingers,filibustered and dominated the conversation, spouting bullshit rationalizations, Katy as is typical for liberals sat there like a deer in the headlights.. This goes on every week, with right wing filibuster and liberal guests being run over.
What's with the liberal mentality? No wonder we are in deep shit., If you can't fight, you are going to get your ass whipped.
There are liberals who don't shrink from the fight, like Mike Nellis, Cenk Uygur, Stephanie Miller, etc. etc. but Maher doesn't put them on any more--Since Covid forced him out of his studio, he's become a libertarian jerkwad.
Exactly why I never waste my time on Bill Maher!
I seek knowledge and want to know what libertarians are thinking. I learn nothing if all I listen to is the choir.
Actually, his New Rules does make a lot of sense, at leas to me. Then again I a progressive,but not a ideologue much less a purist.
Bullshit. I watched the same show. Katy Tur did not get flustered, shrink or back down. She held her own throughout the show.
McCarthy talked a lot, but he did not dominate. He spouted gibberish about why January 6 occurred, and how the 'weaponized' Biden DOJ victimized him by gathering his Jan 2021 cellphone data. Sounds like he was ready to make a claim on the slush fund. Didn't mention that he called Trump numerous times to beg him to call off the rioters.
Katy Tur immediately clarified that the 'data' was numbers called & times, NOT names, NOT conversations. She did not let him play the victim.
You seem to have a very outdated mindset of
angry GOP men = right, vs smart liberal females = weak. But remember who quit his job as House Leader because he couldn't take the pressure or control his caucus. Then remember Nancy Pelosi...strong, confident, still standing despite all the haters.
I didn't say she shrank or backed down, but McCarthy did dominate the conversation, and that was the point. It happens with all all "conservative" host, . Rachel Maddow even had to stand. up,to get her point in.
My point is that Katy could have and should have jumped in and corrected him, and did what he did filibuster and take over the conversation, but liberals are always polite, and that works to our disadvantage.
I was waiting for Katy to correct McCarthy's bullshit, but when she started he wold interrupt and go in a diatribe again.
Liberals have to learn to fight fire with fire.To hell with his nice guy shit.
Bunkers for billionaires deserves maximum exposure, but is getting none. Zuckerberg is building a luxury bunker in Hawaii. Medium.com (a paywall) has run articles on billionaire bunkers, nothing in Meidas, KOS or any other "liberal" pub or site.
America has clearly lost its way. We have been deteriorating for the last half-century. While we can point to the ideology of Republicans as consistent with the change, Democratic presidents have done little to turn things around. Citizens United should have been Obama's #1 priority. It wasn't. In my mind, the only thing that separates the two parties is that Democrats devote more time and energy to governing, whereas Republicans devote more time and energy to ruling. Ruling is so much easier and wealth-enhancing for the rulers.
Put differently, America today reflects a widespread moral failure, and too few people seem motivated to repent our sins of commission and omission, reform our ways, and restore our democracy. It sure seems like this November is where we either embrace fascism or restore democracy and bring this current regime to justice.
Henry David Thoreau: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root”. Once again, Thom absolutely nails it. Too many politicians across the board knowingly and loudly take swings at the fringe results of the abuse du jour while steadfastly ignoring its cause. The root isn’t whatever “ism” has manifested, it’s concentrated wealth and the attendant concentration of power. Today’s wealthy powerful utterly own one major political party and utterly cow, and own, a huge proportion of the other. Bernie, AOC, Warren, and more, and a raft of new candidates, know better. They deserve our enthusiastic support. The corporate, AIPAC-owned others are an impediment we can’t afford or justify.
I'm glad to see Thom make this connection. Corporations are entities designed to take ever-greater profits at the expense of everything else, until the world and everything in it have been stripped of their value. They are like doomsday machines with no off switch.
But it should be noted that fascism and communism are not precise opposites; fascism is a racist political philosophy supporting imperial capitalism. Communism is an socialist economic philosophy supported by a dictatorship that could be fascist, but usually isn't.
As for the Supreme Court, let's get rid of it. They will always have a bias, there is never any impartiality and giving nine unelected people that much power can only lead to ruin. Let lower court rulings stand. There are enough of them so that rulings are averaged out (hopefully).
Musk put the fix on changing votes and nothing is being done to stop it
The Republicans recognized a salient truth, one ignored by the Democrats. The ruth was voiced by LBJ . He described a political tactic used to distract the working class: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you".
It's just blacks, but as Trump has demonstrated, minorities of every class, religious, economic, social, sexual and immigrants.
The same ugly part of humanity that a certain little corporal with a toothbrush mustache use to rise to power.
That butt hole James Carville and mainstream Dmes, and many liberals as well, want us to belive that it is the economy stupid, while the Republicans press on with the culture war
In Texas thare is the Matthew 25 Christian, Talarico, running for Senate, he is being attacked from the right, by the likes of Stephen Miller, as a soy boy, and even transgendered, and sadly such attacks will work in Texas.
Texas runs on toxic masculinity, and it is not restricted to white men either, Latino's are very dominant in that sphere.
Our Fascist Corporate Overlords [FCO] "are" latter-day wannabe King Leopold II's for whom we gather and extract the equivalents of rubber, palm oil, and ivory as working stiffs.
That is, until the robots come for our careers en masse, at which point we become 100% expendable in the workforce. And that's why DT wants mail-order firearms. So we can take it out on one another.
FCO's are turning the nation into the equivalent of the Congo Free State as it was in Conrad's time.
It could be that we've never really been better than a "Heart of Darkness" from the get-go.
#VOTE Rs out #Draft Eric
In 1914, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned us that vast fortunes are inconsistent with democracy, and later attributed to him is the statement,“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
Despite that warning, then, as Thom's article states "Three preceding Republican presidents (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) had dismantled what little regulation was left from the progressive Republicans (Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) and dropped Wilson’s 91% top income tax rate down to 25%, kicking off the Republican Great Depression." What has happened since the Reagan years seems like a replay. Will it take another cataclysmic event before enough of us wake up and put things right?
The Viet Nam war, the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War and now the Iran War were created because a sitting president wanted to get re elected to a second term. They were hugely expensive Wars. They created enough drama and false patriotism to get them re elected.
We the people were being manipulated into paying for these wars with dead American soldiers and our tax dollars. But, a lot of us were aware of the factual deceptive motives
behind these devastating wars. This is my impression and I am not a historian.
We the people are constantly subjected to false narratives by politicians for their ulterior motives. Is it possible that the United States has become too big and diverse for sanity?
Those of us who are not racists and who are happy to be middle class and also would like to protect victims of racism and poverty, would like to have our own country and stop murdering wars.
It’s why Republicans defund education. As Trump said, “I LOVE the uneducated!” If you have had civics and don’t know how democracy is supposed to work, how will you know when it isn’t being run correctly. As Commies and Fascists have done for decades, if they can destroy a population’s trust in democracy, it makes them consider other forms. Putin destroyed the faith of Russians in their fledgling democracy, so they would consider his East Germany form of fascism. How do you do that? Friction strategy. As Reagan, Bush and Trump have done, you cut staff, cut funding, add barriers, put incompetent people (or worse)in charge. Thats what Trump and DOGE did on steroids, as strategized in Project 2025. The result is dysfunction, poor services, delays, mistakes and cries of “what am I paying for.” The obvious Republican response is “we can fix it, just give us total control (without oversight or transparency) so we can privatize it all to our corporate donors.” It’s a con.
If you really want to make America great again, you MUST go back to the policies, processes, regulations, laws and tax codes odes that MADE it that way. As an organizational behavior and quality improvement practitioner, I have been driven facts and history. Truths: “Using the SAME process, but expecting different results is a sign of insanity!” The opposite is also true: Using a DIFFERENT process, but expecting the same results (such as an affordable middle class) is also a sign of insanity! Since 1981, Republicans have drastically changed the processes (just as Hoover and Coolidge did), but continue to lie and tell us it will “trickle down” to the middle class. It never has-it never will. It is a flawed economic model.
This may seem unrelated but I cannot help thinking about the upcoming “celebration” of the 250th birthday of the country. May I suggest an antidote and a counter way of celebrating by the rest of us:
Have each state create a local large gathering. After all, it was 13 very disparate colonies that somehow managed to collaborate around a common cause to create a very delicate union. Let us celebrate our “federation” and remember that heritage of finding commonality amid difference.
“We the thirteen colonies join to establish a union”
I hated Reagan since he was governor of California. And when he gutted the air traffic controllers union & kicked the mentally ill out of hospitals we could see where this was going & now it's here in fucking spades!!!!
Years ago I said there were super wealthy people who we didn't know that were running the show & everybody laughed at me! Well, they're not laughing now! And while I got the last laugh I'm not laughing I'm pissed off.
Those ga-zillionaires better worry. When the Russian serfs revolted they killed the Czar & his family & took over the wealth of the country. Yeah, yeah I know they installed an authoritarian government & the serfs just had a new master aka Comrade but it still happened & their super wealthy had to flee. So our super wealthy better watch out too. Piss off enough people & your precious Ivory Towers will come down too!!!
Because the Billionaires, the Very Wealthy, have carefully rigged everything to enable Capitalism to do it's #1 job, to redistribute as much wealth as possible up from the 99% to the 1%.
A primary culprit is no taxes on unrealized capital gains.
There is a good argument for this, to encourage and reward investment and saving. But the gold old Law of the Golden Mean applies, as it does almost everywhere.
Too little is bad, too much is bad, enough is good.
Now the Billionaires own est. $8 trillion in assets, everyone needs enough to live with dignity, nobody needs billions or hundreds of millions. I would propose a 5% annual tax on assets over $100 million, including unrealized capital gains. Elon Musk with est. $800 billion would pay about $40 billion a year more than he does. The billionaires collectively would pay about $400 billion more than they do now.