My God, are we Americans the stupidest collection of primates ever to tread the earth?
These days I can't help but recall the fact that for several generations we were all brought up breathing airborne lead which we, as a society, had foolishly allowed greedhead corporations to put into virtually all gasoline.
Lead, even in minute concentrations, can have a devastating effect on one's IQ. Maybe this factors in to the idiotic capitulation of small-d democratic rule to the forces of autocracy that we now find ourselves living in.
Think about it; back when our country really was great, (as contrasted to the boastful bluster of the Trumpoids), we built grand projects like the great dams and Hydro power systems, the cross continental highway systems, the gigantic bridges that we have taken for granted ever since, the top marginal tax rate was 95 percent! Back during the New Deal they almost passed a 100 percent tax on incomes over a certain level, but they bargained it down to a mere 95 percent. These days, of course, following the decades-long war of attrition that was started so many years ago by Ronnie Reagan, paying taxes at all seems to have become almost a voluntary contribution on the part of the wealthiest and the biggest corporate entities. So many tax exemptions and deductions have been showered upon the fortunate few; those who, incidentally, pay the ever escalating costs of the political campaigns of their enablers in government, which makes the tax rules.
Any objective observer can see that we have created, ever since the unfortunate Supreme Court decision, the bizarre ruling that money is free speech, and that the more you have of it, the louder your speech gets to be.
These two critical factors, the collapse of the taxation of those with all the money, along with the idea that rather than one person one vote, we now live in a land where it is more like one dollar one vote, has created a viciously regressive feedback loop that has been at work for generations now, where one political party, though it represent a clear minority of the country's voters, makes clear to the fraction of 1 percent who, whether by clever hard work or the lottery of the womb, holds the lion's share of the nation's wealth, that it will adopt as its guiding principle, the further enrichment of those who already own so much, at the expense of the other 99.9 percent.
This has caused a tsunami of cash into the coffers of those willing to get out there and pitch for the further enrichment of the greediest, least principled oligarchs, even though it may be (and usually is) couched in terms of appealing to the lowest and most primitive prejudices and weaknesses of the hapless rubes, whose votes they court.
When you give over the entire media spectrum to rapacious oligarchic empires like the Murdochs, or corporate entities whose behavior is indistinguishable from them, you have sacrificed the people's ability to be informed about their society. One of the founding fathers spoke about the impossibility of having a successful democracy without a well informed citizenry.
I recall, so many years ago, reading "1984" and thinking, "yeah, it's a good yarn, but people would never be that stupid, how would they not see the absurdity of the emotionally charged propaganda that big brother was putting out." Well, that was then and this is now. Donald Trump has somehow turned the Republican Party into his very own cult of personality; the castrati in public office who people this cult have no problem being on tape calling for his resignation, then, in a matter of days, being happy to nuzzle-bum him in hopes of getting a favorable mention.
It is an abiding mystery to me what exactly his hidebound devotees get out of his ridiculously incompetent, blatantly illegal, self-serving term as president. About all I can come up with is a visceral connection to his devotion to white supremacy and demonization of "the other." Fear and loathing.
Having just watched the first installment of the January 6 hearings, one must wonder exactly how much damning evidence must be amassed before people are held to account. If you have not watched the Netflix documentary about Trump's good buddy Jeffrey Epstein, please do. After decades of unbelievable child sexual abuse with all his good buddies, Trump, Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, etc., he was given a "country club" 18-month "prison sentence," where he was allowed to go to his "office" all day, where he presumably got to screw more 16-year-olds.
It is not just a question of basic fairness that the super-wealthy be held accountable; it's a matter of the survival of democracy! When the vicious anti-Semite Henry Ford decided to throw in his lot with the Nazis during World War II, offering them generous terms on war matériel, his entire empire should have been seized at the end of the war and converted to a public trust, to be sold as stock to benefit the American people or held as a public asset. Much like the Richard Mellon Scaife estate which has fought for years against any kind of democratic benefit to the American people or any and all of the slimy dark funders of the Federalist Society, a prodigiously funded activist group devoted to the care and feeding of the most regressive, anti-democratic reactionary judicial candidates to pass on to anti-democratic leaders like Donald Trump, who pledged to make his selections for Supreme Court strictly from their preferred list of candidates, all of whom ended up being rated by the nonpartisan American Bar Association as "unqualified."
There is a word for this kind of co-mingling of personal profit making entities with the levers of government power: fascism.
As the Jan. 6 hearings will no doubt lay out in fine detail, there is only one proper place for Donald J. Trump: federal prison. And his estate should be seized and converted to public assets or sold and paid to all his victims, just like his buddy Epstein.
This and previous columns are on my blog https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/5370811933821505309/3881306687071203543
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