Billionaire Coup Continues as Resistance Scrambles into Action

"In an open call on X yesterday with Republican Senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, apartheid billionaire Elon Musk — whose father says he was chauffeured to school in white-run South Africa in a Rolls Royce — lit into the regulations that created and protect the American middle class and our democracy:

“Regulations, basically, should be default gone. Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”

In a child-like echo of Ayn Rand, Musk added:

“These regulations are added willy-nilly all the time. So, we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation and get the government off the backs of everyday Americans so people can get things done. … If the government has millions of regulations holding everyone back, well, it’s not freedom. We’ve got to restore freedom.”

We know this is crazy: Every state in the union has put into place an agency to regulate insurance companies because that very industry has a long, horrible history of ripping people off and refusing to pay claims unless the power of the state is invoked against them.

We regulate banks and brokerages for the same reason; when we deregulated them in the 1920s and the late 1990s the result was huge rip-offs that produced the Republican Great Depression and the Bush Crash of 2008.

We regulate automobile manufacturers because they have a history of putting profits over the lives of their customers (Ford Pinto 900 dead, GM trucks 2000 dead, etc.); refineries because their emissions cause cancer and asthma; drugs because unscrupulous manufacturers killed people in previous eras; workplace safety after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 young women; voting because corrupt politicians rigged elections.

We regulate traffic with signs and stoplights to keep order and reduce accidents; we regulate police to prevent them from abusing innocent people; we regulate building codes so peoples’ homes don’t collapse or catch on fire from faulty cheap wiring.

The Hartmann Report 

And we regulate agriculture and food production so that the groceries we buy at the store don't make us sick or kill us. We regulate pollution, industrial externalities, so that the water we drink or air we breathe doesn't poison or kill us. Etc. 

America's captain of industry and icon of the future, the man who built the first popular electric car, actually thinks we get to some green sustainable future, without devastating wild fires in January, without increasing droughts and water shortages, without any regulations?! Or, if we inadvertently get rid of a necessary regulation, we'll just add it back later-- after how many people, or how many rich people, or how many rich white people die? Regulations, any regulations, all regulations, just get in the way of people getting stuff done, says Musk?! 

Of course, there are useless, wasteful, out-dated regulations, undoubtably many. Those that obstruct people from getting stuff done, NIMBY zoning laws getting in the way of more housing, say, ought to be identified and removed through the democratic process. But wiping out all regulations or rules, it should be obvious to anyone, is a completely stupid and childish idea. 

Oh, but anti-regulation sentiment is popular, 60-40, or whatever, so we can't win elections by opposing popular sentiment! How did we get to such a catastrophically stupid place as a country? 

Getting frustrated with the democratic process or bureaucracy and gridlock and the difficulties of getting stuff done is everybody's experience and isn't new. So, again, identify some bad regulations and get your republican congress to remove them. Do the work. This is just moronic wishful thinking passing for leadership, and people mistaking destruction and breaking things for bold innovation.

Regulations or the law or the so-called Deep State getting in the way of some megalomaniac neo-nazi billionaire and his gang of tech bro acolytes wiping out all regulations or departments of government, or the ones they don't like anyway, is now not only a good thing, I mean the resistance in the system these fascists are targeting, but actually crucial to the survival of democracy and good government.  

And you don't have to be pollyanna about any good government in our past to recognize that this is a massive power grab and assault on the human welfare of the general population. Can our checks and balances hold up under this democratically elected assault on government? We'll see but it's not looking good. 

Shock Doctrine in 21st Century: Superrich Profit from Economic Crises

From The Hartmann Report:

 When Wall Street banks — exploiting Republican-demanded deregulation of banking and investment rules — crashed the American economy in 2007, 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.

While over 8 million Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent (and the Bush and Cheney families) saw it as a buying opportunity.

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

But the morbidly rich were doing great.

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

As the economy recovered, rich people who’d used their increased income to buy 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, for example, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.

Once again the market collapsed, this time under Republican Trump, and working people, now out of work, were selling their stocks at a loss just to pay the mortgage and buy food.

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 2007!

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 4 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).

Just during that one single terrible “crash” year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, the world’s 2,365 billionaires saw their wealth increase by a full 54%, as 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.

And now it begins anew: Republicans are meeting at Trump’s Doral golf resort in Miami today to plan strategy.

Don’t expect them to argue that it would be a bad thing if his plans provoked an economic crisis: To the contrary, that may well be exactly what they — and their billionaire owners — are hoping for.

For Crying out Loud, Cheetolini and MAGA are Traitors to the Country!

Doubt this long list could be exhaustive but feels like some reminders are in order. At this point it should be generally recognized that Trump and MAGA are a non-stop crime spree and general desecration of democracy and the Constitution. 

But, and this is the biggest echo with Timothy Ryback's recent book about the final rise of Hitler, the conservative right, or much of it, doesn't like Trump, knows he is a violent bigot, knows he is a self-dealing financial fraud, but they talk themselves into believing they can manage this clown to their own benefit and fear more Dem reforms, taxes and regulations, in short, more Bidenomics (even though their economic record is better than any Repug admin in over half a century), as the greater threat. 

The potential for a violent fascist catastrophe in this developing scenario is terrifying! 

And the mainstream media, as corporate toadies, are so numb and addicted to Grump's outrage click-bait power that his worst offenses are overlooked and thereby dismissed and burnished, by conservatives, again, as so much political courage, he's standing up against the liberal establishment (trying to bring him down), fighting for his gun-toting white Christian Nationalist salt-of-the-earth constituents-- instead of, in fact, spearheading an unprecedented and lawless assault on democracy and our national independence and law and order and women's rights and the environment and, basically, just about anything else protecting the basic rights of common Americans. 

For crying out loud, Grump and MAGA are traitors to the country and obvious assets to Putin!

So, as a reminder: 

Why is the Guy Who Told Us to Drink Bleach a Step Away from Being President, Thom Hartmann   

Americans are dumbfounded. How is it that half this nations’ voters are on the verge of returning to office a guy who:

— Began his life of crime busted for writing “C” for “Colored” on Black rental applicants’ forms,
— Mismanaged the Covid crisis so badly America had the developed world’s highest mortality rate with at least a half-million unnecessary deaths,
— Is credibly accused of sexual assault by more than twenty women (one 14 years old) and found by a jury — twice— to have raped one of them,
— Forcibly tore nursing babies from the arms of their mothers with almost a thousand of those children still missing,
— Solicited a billion-dollar bribe just this month and illegally took over $7 million (that we know of: the real number is almost certainly a multiple of that) from foreign governments while in office (Senator Robert Menendez was a slacker),
— Praised Nazis who marched chanting “Jews will not replace us!” as “very fine people,”
— Conspired with militia leaders to storm the US Capitol, leading to the death of 5 civilians and 3 police officers,
— Regularly quotes Hitler’s vicious, racist rhetoric referring to human beings as “scum” and “vermin” while claiming people of color “poison the blood of our nation,”
— Stole national security secrets and repeatedly lied to the FBI when we tried to recover them,
— Abandoned our Kurdish allies to Putin, leading to their mass slaughter by Russian troops and warplanes,
— Gave to Russia at least one spy we know of in an Oval Office meeting with that country’s foreign minister and US ambassador,
— Did his best to destroy NATO and hand Ukraine to Putin,
— Negotiated a deal to build an office/apartment building in Moscow that was to be executed a week after he took office and lied to the American people about it,
— Knowingly lied to the nation for almost four full years about having lost the last election,
— Called our fallen soldiers buried at Normandy and Arlington “suckers” and “losers” and ridiculed John McCain and every other American POW,
— Gutted the EPA and sold off public lands to drilling and mining interests who were greasing his party’s palms,
— Proudly packed the Supreme Court with people he hand-selected to end women’s right to abortion,
— Repeatedly violated the Hatch Act, using federal property for campaign and political activities,
— Is currently violating the Logan Act by interfering in President Biden’s foreign policy efforts,
— Praised the world’s worst dictators while trash-talking our democratic allies,
— Holds rallies in which he curses, using words that can’t be broadcast on TV or radio,
— Threatened the Georgia secretary of state with jail if he wouldn’t help overturn the 2020 election,
— Facilitated his son-in-law extracting two billion dollars from a murderous dictator,
— Gave billionaires a two-trillion-dollar tax cut that’s being paid for by raising taxes on working class people for the next few years,
— Promises he’ll be a dictator from his first day in office and will bring about a “Unified Reich,”
— Said he’ll imprison or destroy the media and those who criticize him, using language last attributed to Hitler,
— Slept with a porn star and a Playboy bunny in the months after his less-than-two-years-married trophy wife gave birth to his son and then paid them both to hush it up so he could get elected,
— Convinced China to give his daughter millions worth of trademarks while accusing his opponent’s son of corruption for taking a routine payment for being on the board of a foreign natural gas company,
— Used explicit Nazi iconography to label his political opponents,
— Tried to extort a foreign leader to manufacture dirt on his political opponent while withholding military aid to that nation as it was under attack by Russia,
— Collaborated with Putin to get elected and, when the FBI tried to investigate it, engaged in at least 10 documented felony obstructions of justice,
— Trash talks America’s criminal justice system, insisting he’s the victim of “racist” Black and Hispanic prosecutors and judges,
— Committed multiple campaign finance crimes,
— Convinced about half of Americans the country’s in a recession when in fact we’re in better economic shape than any time since World War II,
— Engaged in and was convicted for both tax and insurance fraud,
— Got multiple deferments to avoid the Vietnam War because he bought a X-ray of somebody else’s bone spurs from a corrupt doctor,
— Stole from a children’s cancer charity,
— Repeatedly joked about the assault and murder attempt of Paul Pelosi, implicitly encouraging his followers to commit more violence against Democrats,
— Was found liable for running a fraudulent university,
— Tried to get his own vice president assassinated, and, among other things,
— Stole millions from his siblings and relatives and then pissed it all away by being an incompetent playboy businessman, having to declare bankruptcy six times.

Any one of these things would have destroyed a normal politician. Two or more would consign him or her to permanent political purgatory.