HotCoffee, I saw the picture of the house. on Mexico Beach. How cool are you doing something like that? I still say you should explore mortgage and insurance companies just in case they will offer discounts to buyers of your products and somehow you can use that in your marketing. Capitalism at its finest. It could be worse. Bernie "freeshit" Sanders could have been president and you would have to turn your ideas over to big brother so people in black pajamas could go marching off to the factory every day and you get nothing.

Hillary Clinton is the gift that keeps on giving. I call her the bunion, always there, can be very painful, and the surgery may be worse than just learning to live with it.

Other than Thom's book the crash of 2016 which he started hyping in late 2014 and early 2015, made me a lot of money as I did the exact opposite of his advice.

Thom is a smart guy but there are at least two topics that he knows absolutely nothing about, Finance and Firearms. He will do mountains of research, twist it the way he sees fit, repeat it for months or years, and pump it out as fact. I have been involved in the firearms industry for years from the competitive, retail, and political side. Regardless of Thoms "research" I could refute literally 90% of his views with facts published by the FBI, ATF, and CDC. Nothing fancy, just real hard data. Back in the day, on multiple occasions I offered to get in touch with, and bring in to the studio (which was televised on RT at the time) and have real firearm knowledgeable people come on his show with the caveat he discuss, not talk over, the guest. He ran from that idea as fast as he could. Thom does not like to lose what he calls debates, I call one sided lectures thanks to his ability to pot down the guest..

On the founding fathers second amendment side, there are pages of quotes from the major patriots of the day supporting every citizens right to own arms. I have them but to avoid duplicating another groupie here with loooong posts, I will hold off until needed.

Perhaps, if Thoms new book is gun oriented, it will be fun to poke holes in it on a daily basis with one quote per day. I can easily go a couple of months before we get into actual real facts and numbers, then it gets heavy.

You may like this. This past summer I made it a point to get both local senators out to the gun range and taught them to shoot for their very first time. The best was a democrat who would not leave the range until I had taken multiple pictures of her holding my handgun and her excellent target. I do not know if I changed her, but she darn near fell over when I gave her a $100 check for her upcoming election telling her I respected her for her commitment to show up and shoot before she voted on the topic. Had the check been for less I think she would have framed it and hung it on her office wall. Gun people are not supposed to like democrat anti-gunners.

Sorry for the long post.

Good day to you.

Opening Statement by Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC
48th Session of the IPCC, Incheon, Korea, 1 October 2018

"It’s a great honour to welcome you to my home country, Korea, and I am very grateful to the government of the Republic of Korea and the authorities of the City of Incheon for hosting us here in this beautiful conference centre.

I am particularly honoured, because this will be one of the most important meetings in the IPCC’s history. We will consider the Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 ºC. That is our main business here this week and I will concentrate on the 1.5 ºC report in these remarks.

Why is this report so keenly awaited?

Scientists have been warning us for years that we can expect to see more extreme weather with climate change. The heat waves, wildfires, and heavy rainfall events of recent months all over the world underscore these warnings.

Three weeks ago in New York, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described climate change as the great challenge of our time. But, he also noted that, thanks to science, we know its size and nature. Science alerts us to the gravity of the situation, but science also, and this special report in particular, helps us understand the solutions available to us.

Distinguished delegates, nearly three years ago your governments adopted the Paris Agreement. It sets a target of holding the rise in global mean temperatures to well below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 ºC.

At that time, relatively little was known about the risks avoided in a 1.5 ºC world compared with a 2 ºC warmer world, or about the pathway of greenhouse gas emissions compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5 ºC. So, as part of the decision adopting the Paris Agreement, governments invited the IPCC to prepare a report assessing the impacts of warming of 1.5 ºC and related emissions pathways.

Governments asked the IPCC to deliver this report in 2018, in time for what has become the Talanoa Dialogue at this year’s Climate Conference, COP24.

To prepare a report on 1.5 ºC to this timeline was extremely ambitious. The IPCC, and through it the scientific community, responded positively and with sincere enthusiasm.

In April 2016, at our 43rd Session, the IPCC decided to prepare the report as part of the work programme for the Sixth Assessment Cycle. The Panel decided to prepare this report in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty, thus placing the report firmly among the tools to be used to achieve the sustainable development goals.

We held the scoping meeting in August of that year, and the Panel approved the outline at the 44th Session in October.

In February 2017 the Panel was able to announce the author team of the report – 91 authors and review editors were selected from 40 countries. And less than 20 months later, you have the report for your consideration.

Let me give you some statistics to illustrate the scale of work that has been achieved in this time. The final draft of the report contains over 6,000 cited references. The expert review of the First Order Draft, from July to September 2017, attracted almost 13,000 comments from some 500 experts in 61 countries. The government and expert review of the Second Order Draft, from January to February this year, attracted over 25,000 comments from 570 experts and officials in 71 countries.

Governments provided close to 4,000 comments on the Final Government Draft. So in all we have received 42,000 comments on the drafts of this report. Allow me to remind you that under the IPCC procedures, the authors must address each comment received in the review process.

Review is an essential part of the IPCC process, and we are grateful to the hundreds of experts who have contributed to our work in this way. We thank the 133 Contributing Authors who have added their expertise.

And special thanks to our National Focal Points who played a key role in the nomination of authors and the review process. I would also like to express my profound respect and gratitude to the co-chairs, authors and review editors, and the technical support units, for accomplishing this Herculean task.

This achievement goes beyond numbers.

This Special Report is unique in IPCC history as it has been prepared under the joint scientific leadership of all three IPCC Working Groups. Each chapter is a genuine piece of cross-disciplinary work, bringing together all the scientific expertise of the IPCC. That is why the line-by-line consideration of the Summary for Policymakers will be conducted by the First Joint Session of Working Groups I, II and III. In the same way, the Summary for Policymakers that will be considered in detail this week integrates the most important findings of the chapters in each section.

Distinguished delegates, the scientific community has responded to the invitation of policymakers and presented you with a robust and timely report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 ºC and related greenhouse gas emission pathways.

The task is now yours.

You will consider the draft Summary for Policymakers line by line to ensure that it is consistent with the detailed assessment of scientific, technical and socio-economic information provided by the underlying detailed chapters.

Governments have asked the IPCC for an assessment of warming of 1.5 degrees, its impacts and related emissions pathways, to help them address climate change. We will work together in a constructive and collaborative spirit to produce a strong, robust and clear Summary for Policymakers that responds to the invitation of governments three years ago while upholding the scientific integrity of the IPCC.

Lastly I would like to share the important news with you that these sessions will be climate-neutral. We have taken measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions where possible and we will be estimating and compensating the remaining ones.

I am also pleased to inform you that the financial position of the IPCC continues to improve. I would like to thank the many governments who have contributed in recent months for their generous and continuing support, and urge all of you to provide us with the means to carry out the tasks you have given us. In this regard I would like to thank the Panel for your financial support for this report – 1.2 million Swiss francs for the various meetings required to prepare and approve it – and for endorsing the outline of the report and the author team.

I would also like to express my gratitude for the in-kind contributions of the countries that hosted the scoping meetings for this report and the four lead author meetings – Switzerland, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Botswana.

Thank you for your trust in the IPCC.

I am pleased to note that we have posted on the PaperSmart system the Code of Conduct for IPCC meetings that was introduced at the first Lead Author Meeting of Working Group I a couple of months ago. I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss this in the Panel soon; it provides a valuable framework to ensure that all of us here have a respectful working environment.

Let me finish by thanking the Government of Korea for its generous support for this meeting. I would also like to take the opportunity to thank our partners for their continued unwavering support – our parent organizations WMO and UN Environment, and the UNFCCC.

With these words I would like to wish you a successful and collegial meeting. Thank you for your attention."

https://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm

As Science Improves Climate Change Forecast Gets Hotter.

G'morning DianeR,

I didn't watch Laura's program last night but I did tape it to watch today.

That 1 home left on mexico beach after the last hurricane is similar to what we are doing.

---------

The ghoul is still around!

https://www.libertynation.com/hillary-the-thing-that-wouldnt-leave/

more on immigration.... https://youtu.be/H0d21nQBY8o

Be back later.....enjoy!

PS

I just got Thom's special e mail about his new book cover...I wonder if he wants to take away his brothers gun?

And

Special Counsel and Former FBI Director Robert Mueller Accused of Rape By ‘Very Credible Witness ‘ https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/10/breaking-report-exclusive-documents-special-counsel-and-former-fbi-director-robert-mueller-accused-of-rape-by-very-credible-witness/

She MUST be believed!

HotCoffee,

Great morning. Fire resistant homes. Sounds like a great product. You should find an insurance company to invest with you. On a side note, my son and a group of his friends just heavily invested in a fire retardant company (which will remain nameless at this point) so I keep an eye on this market segment.

You were celebrating a big win last night and President Trump was being interviewed (soft ball questions) by Laura Ingraham on Thom's favorite news outlet, FOX News. Wait until they hear about his attempt to end the anchor baby tourism program. More exploding heads on the left. I am sure they will screech "future voter suppression".

Here you go.

See ya.

This is an evidence that the economy is slowly falling. I'm afraid this can lead to an economic recession.

Chris,

towing Summerville SC

Published on Monday, October 22, 2018 by Common Dreams.

Stop GOP Voter Suppression—Or Else!
Most American voters generally don’t like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the GOP is simply not letting them vote.

by Thom Hartmann:

The Republican Party is currently hoping to win nationwide using two simple elements: explicit and overt racism, and voter suppression.

No “ideas”; no pitch for tax cuts; no discussion of their “replacement” for the Affordable Care Act; no push for better schools, hospitals, airports, roads or bridges; no promise for more and better jobs—none of these staples of the 2016 presidential campaign can be found in pretty much any Republican advertising today.

Instead, the public Republican message is all about race or the subset of race, religion (“Muslim” stands in for “brown Arab” in GOP-speak) and “immigration” (aka brown people from south of our border). Republicans across the country are even recruiting white supremacist and neo-Nazi gangs to threaten or assault Democrats and their supporters, while Trump praises the criminal assault of reporters in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder.

Meanwhile, Republican secretaries of state across the nation are vigorously purging voters from the rolls (over 14 million, more than 10 percent of America’s active voters, in the past two years, according to investigative reporter Greg Palast).

Immediately after the five Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, 14 GOP-controlled states moved, within a year (some within days), to restrict access to the vote, particularly for communities of color, students, and retired people.

In North Carolina, for example, 158 polling places were permanently closed in the 40 counties with the most African American voters just before the 2016 election, leading to a 16 percent decline in African American early voting in that state. An MIT study found that, nationwide, Hispanic voters wait 150 percent longer in line than white voters, and Black voters can expect to wait 200 percent longer in line to vote.

In Indiana, then-Governor Pence’s new rigorous voter ID law caused an 11.5 percent drop in African American voting. Students are suing for their right to vote, and retired people who no longer drive but care passionately about their Social Security and Medicare are being turned away at the polls by the tens of thousands.

How did it come to this?

The problem for the GOP has deep roots. In the 1870s, when the Party abandoned its Lincolnesque position in favor of granting full citizenship rights to freed slaves, it rapidly slid into the role of being the party of the barons of rail, oil, coal, steel, and construction.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, largely threw its efforts—culminating in the New Deal in 1933 and the Great Society in 1967—in with working people, legislatively protecting unionization efforts, passing Social Security and Medicare, putting the minimum wage and unemployment insurance into law, and creating federal and state agencies to protect workers’ safety, children, and the environment.

This has led to a major problem for the GOP, since the very wealthy and CEOs only constitute a small part of the American voting public. In order to pass tax cuts and cut protective regulations for their rich owners, they needed political power, and—particularly since the disastrous “roaring 20s” leading straight to the Republican Great Depression (yes, they called it that until after WWII)—Republicans needed voters to put them into office.

And this was generally pretty tough for the GOP. In 1974, for example, the GOP only had outright control of seven states. The message of, “elect us and we’ll help the rich people out” just didn't generally resonate with American voters. It’s the reason why, outside of the fluke elections of 1946 and 1952, Democrats outright controlled the House of Representatives for three generations, from 1933 to 1996, and controlled the Senate for most of that time.

Desperate to win the presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon even went so far as to commit treason by torpedoing a peace deal that LBJ had worked out with the Vietnamese. According to the then-president of Iran, Reagan did the same thing by cutting a deal with Iran to hold the U.S. embassy hostages until after the election, destroying Jimmy Carter’s chances of re-election.

In 2000, though, the GOP changed tactics. After Reagan almost got busted for Iran/Contra (he testified that he “forgot” about details of the program over 80 times; he was saved by his growing Alzheimer’s from an indictment), they realized that getting busted for treason wasn't worth the risk. They needed a “Plan B.”

And it was deliciously simple. If the majority of voters don’t like what you’re selling, then just don’t let them vote.

Paul Weyrich had promoted this idea back in 1980 when he was campaigning for Reagan (after co-founding the Heritage Foundation), and, indeed, many Republican luminaries (like William Rehnquist, who went from poll-intimidator in the 1960s to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) rose up through the ranks by participating in Republican-run voter intimidation schemes.

But it became the foundational go-to tactic for the GOP in 2000.

While they used smear and innuendo to attack Al Gore (ridiculing him for helping write the legislation that created the modern internet, for example), the main thing that got George W. Bush into the White House was voter suppression crimes committed by his brother, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and Bush’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. Throwing somewhere between 50,000 and 90,000 African American voters off the rolls, they were able to get the vote close enough that five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court functionally awarded Bush the presidency. (The BBC covered this in 2001 in two major investigative reports here and here that were literally seen all over the world except on any American media.)

By 2016, the Republican Party had fine-tuned their voter suppression and intimidation systems to the point that they ran in nearly 30 states like well-oiled machines. Between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, for example, Ohio had purged more than 2 million voters from its rolls, the vast majority (more than 2:1) in heavily African American and Hispanic counties. (And the Supreme Court ruled last year that they can keep it up; other states have since adopted their new tactic of caging voters.)

The New York Times noted that in Wisconsin, around 300,000 registered voters were turned away at the polls because they didn't have the particular types of ID necessitated by Scott Walker’s ALEC-recommended new voter ID law (in Texas, the Times reported, the number was 900,000).

It’s symbiotic: billionaires and corporations spend hundreds of millions to fund Republicans, who pass laws and tax breaks that give billions to the corporations and billionaires, who then recycle a fraction of that, mere millions, back to the legislators they own. To keep the cycle going, both must prevent people who object to this system from voting.

ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), funded by the Koch network and other billionaires and big corporations, has been at the forefront of these efforts, with the majority of voter suppressive state laws passed having been introduced by ALEC-affiliated Republican legislators. ALEC itself facilitated the production of voter suppressive “model legislation.”

Average American voters generally don’t like billionaires and corporations running politics, so the billionaires and their corporations have organized major efforts to keep those people from voting. Numbers are sketchy, because Republican Secretaries of State are unwilling to release purge numbers and details without being sued to do so.

Fortunately for America, investigative reporter Greg Palast is executing such lawsuits right now, and the purge lists he’s acquired in the past two weeks include over 90,000 people in largely Democratic parts of Nevada, 769,436 voters purged in Colorado, 340,134 in Georgia, 550,000 in Illinois, a large but as-yet-uncounted list from Nebraska, and 469,000 just purged in Indiana. More are coming in virtually daily, as Palast continues his lawsuits, along with the NAACP and Rainbow Push.

True the Vote, the latest Astroturf group pushing for voter purges, is partly fundedby the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), the group that spent millions to run nationwide TV ads for Judge Brett Kavanaugh disparaging Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony as a “sham.”

JCN, in turn, is funded by the Wellspring Committee that, according to investigative reporter Ken Vogel, was started by billionaires Charles and David Koch. (Their father, Fred Koch, was a founder and major funder of the John Birch Society, which ran “Impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice] Earl Warren” billboards and ads across America in the 1950s and 1960s decrying the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation order in Brown v. Board, and funded publications and efforts characterizing the voter drives of Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist plot.)

Without these major voter purges, and without the disenfranchisement of young people, old people, and poor people by voter ID laws, it’s a virtual certainty that America would have had President Al Gore and President Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party would have a 7-3 or larger Democratic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Republicans, instead of helping working people, love to lecture Americans that only their elected officials and Federal and Supreme Court justices are actually channeling the “original intent” of the founders and framers of the Constitution. (“Originalism” is a scam run uniquely by Republican justices, for example.)

Like their rigged elections and their ads saying that they want to defend Social Security and protect us against insurance companies viz preexisting conditions, it’s a lie.

Although about half of the founders were slaveholders, practicing their own form of voter suppression, they nonetheless held egalitarian values for the future of this country and worried obsessively about a takeover by the very rich. It’s hard to imagine that they’d ever sanction interpreting the First Amendment as a license for billionaires and corporations to buy our political system (as the Supreme Court first did in 1976 in the Buckley case, and then supercharged in 2010 with Citizens United).

In the summer of 1785, James Madison was essentially running the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he gave a speech (you can read in his Notes on the Convention) about the importance of not allowing the new country they were forming to become an oligarchy, run of, by, and for the rich. He noted that there are “two cardinal objects of government, the rights of persons and the rights of property.”

He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor. “Give all power to property,” he said, “and the indigent will be oppressed.”

In fact, Madison noted, all the former republics that they had studied in his five years of preparation for writing our Constitution had ended up corrupted by exactly that: the political power of concentrated money.

“In all the governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots and lawgivers,” he said, “the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich.”

Thus, wanting to establish a country where the rich didn't end up running it as their own private kingdom or oligarchy, he proposed that only the House of Representatives—the only branch elected directly by the people, and every two years at that—should have the power to raise taxes or spend federal funds.

“The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution,” he said in his speech. “Liberty, not less than justice, pleads for the policy here recommended.

“If all power be suffered to slide into hands [of the rich]” he warned, the American citizenry will “become the dupes and instruments of ambition, or their poverty and dependence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted: in the first, by a despotism growing out of anarchy; in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”

And, indeed, the delegates assembled agreed. Only the House of Representatives, to this day, can raise taxes or spend money.

In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Jefferson noted, “It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

Fighting those instincts of human nature, he argued, was at the core of the American experiment. (Like George Washington and many of his peers, Jefferson died broke. America’s first millionaire came along in 1791—a shipping magnate—and none of the founders or framers were wealthy enough to leave an estate that lasted even to a second generation.)

In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson explained, “I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependance (sic) for continued freedom.”

He added that if we ended up with an oligarchic government that is run, directly or indirectly, by the rich, America’s working people “must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four;… and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they [poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”

One wonders how the employees of the giant corporations that throw so much money at the Republican Party would compare that metaphor with their own current existence, since the GOP has successfully fought any meaningful reform of union rights, universal health care, or the minimum wage since Reagan.

And they’re using voting suppression to maintain a situation that’s so hostile to workers that wages have actually fallen for the bottom half of American workers in the 38 years since Reagan’s election in 1980.

Thomas Paine, in his 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government, noted that, “The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.”

If we fail to do something large, substantial and dramatic about the scourge of voter suppression, we must all begin learning how to rivet chains.

Those are our options.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/10/22/stop-gop-voter-suppression-or-else

"Trickle Down Racism: The Not So New Platform of The Republican Party"

-- by Thom Hartmann

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Thom Hartmann Program 10-29-18

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Published on Wednesday, October 17, 2018 by Common Dreams

"The Fascists Are Coming for Your Social Security and Medicare

The warning signs are already here." --by Thom Hartmann:

The billionaire fascists are coming for your Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And they’re openly bragging about it.

Right after Trump’s election, back in December of 2016, Newt Gingrich openly bragged at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to “break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model.” That “model,” of course, created what we today refer to as “the middle class.”

This week Mitch McConnell confirmed Gingrich’s prophecy, using the huge deficits created by Trump’s billionaire tax cuts as an excuse to destroy “entitlement” programs.

“I think it would be safe to say that the single biggest disappointment of my time in Congress has been our failure to address the entitlement issue, and it’s a shame, because now the Democrats are promising Medicare for All,” McConnell told Bloomberg. He added, “[W]e’re talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”

These programs, along with free public education and progressive taxation, are the core drivers and maintainers of the American middle class. History shows that without a strong middle class, democracy itself collapses, and fascism is the next step down a long and terrible road.

Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and political power away from voters and toward billionaires and transnational corporations.

In July of 2015, discussing SCOTUS’s 5 to 4 conservative vote on Citizens United, President Jimmy Carter told me: “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery…” He added: “[W]e’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors…”

As Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated in an exhaustive analysis of the difference between what most Americans want their politicians to do legislatively, versus what American politicians actually do, it’s pretty clear that President Carter was right.

They found that while the legislative priorities of the top 10 percent of Americans are consistently made into law, things the bottom 90 percent want are ignored. In other words, today in America, democracy only “works” for the top 10 percent of Americans.

For thousands of years, economists and economic observers from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Thomas Piketty have told us that a “middle class” is not a normal byproduct of raw, unregulated capitalism—what right-wing ideologues call “the free market.”

Instead, unregulated markets—particularly markets not regulated by significant taxation on predatory incomes—invariably lead to the opposite of a healthy middle class: they produce extremes of inequality, which are as dangerous to democracy as cancer is to a living being.

With so-called “unregulated free markets,” the rich become super-rich, while grinding poverty spreads among working people like a heroin epidemic. This further polarizes the nation, both economically and politically, which, perversely, further cements the power of the oligarchs.

While there’s a clear moral dimension to this—pointed out by Adam Smith in his classic Theory of Moral Sentiments—there’s also a vital political dimension.

Smith noted, in 1759, that, “All constitutions of government are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end.”

Smith added a cautionary note, however: “[The] disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition… is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Jefferson was acutely aware of this: the Declaration of Independence was the first founding document of any nation in the history of the world that explicitly declared “happiness” as a “right” that should be protected and promoted by government against predations by the very wealthy.

That was not at all, however, a consideration for the architects of supply-side Reaganomics, although they appropriated JFK’s “rising tide lifts all boats” metaphor to sell their hustle to (boatless) working people.

Far more troubling (and well-known to both Smith and virtually all of our nation’s founders), however, was Aristotle’s observation that when a nation pursues economic/political activities that destroy its middle class, it will inevitably devolve either into mob rule or oligarchy. As he noted in Politics:

“Now in all states there are three elements: one class is very rich, another very poor, and a third in a mean. … But a [government] ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes. …

“Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.”

This is how America was for the Boomer generation until about two decades ago: a 30-year-old in the 1970s had a 90 percent chance of having or attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But, since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there’s been more than a 70 percent drop in “social mobility”—the ability to move from one economic station of life into a better one.

So, if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what’s left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do that?

History shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation and a healthy social safety net.

As Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”

Similarly, Thomas Paine, proposing in Agrarian Justice (1797) what we today call Social Security, said that a democracy can only survive when its people “[S]ee before them the certainty of escaping the miseries that under other governments accompany old age…” Such a strong social safety net, Paine argued, “will have an advocate and an ally in the heart of all nations.”

Tragically, Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation’s progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious service to their billionaire paymasters.

Flipping Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans last year passed a multi-trillion-dollar tax break for the rich, with a few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.

Meanwhile, Republicans are already hard at work dismantling the last remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society.

As Ian Milhiser notes, “Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20–50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he’d cut Medicaid by between a third and a half.”

This is not, of course, the first time Republicans have tried this. They’ve been trying to dismantle Social Security since 1936, and Reagan himself even recorded a 33 RPM LP calling LBJ’s Great Society proposal for a program called “Medicare” as “socialism,” saying that if it passed then one day we’d all look back “remembering the time when men were free.”

And it’s always been in service to the same agenda—handing political and economic power over the morbidly rich and the corporations that got them there.

In earlier times, we had a word for this takeover of democracy by the morbidly rich and the corporations: fascism.

As I’ve written before, in early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in the New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. ... The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.

“With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public,” Wallace continued, “but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word “fascist”—the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word.

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: “A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America: “American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, [and] the deliberate poisoners of public information...”

He could have been describing Fox, right-wing hate radio, and the billionaires who keep today’s GOP in power.

Noting that, “Fascism is a worldwide disease,” Wallace further suggested that fascism’s “greatest threat to the United States will come after the war” and will manifest “within the United States itself.”

Watching the Republicans of his day work from the same anti-worker playbook they are today, Wallace added:

“Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.”

As Wallace wrote, some in big business “are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage.”

In a comment prescient of Donald Trump’s trashing of “Mexican rapists” and “gangs” in Chicago, Wallace wrote:

“The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.

“It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice.”

And that prejudice would be exploited to win elections so that the fascists could rob the people and enhance their own power and wealthy.

But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would still have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And if the day ever came when a billionaire opened a “news” network just to promote fascist thinking, they could promote their lies with ease.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.”

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the vice president of the United States saw rising in America, he added:

“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that using the power of the State and the power of the market simultaneously they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

In the election of 2018, we stand at a crossroad that Roosevelt and Wallace only imagined.

Billionaire-funded fascism is rising in America, calling itself “conservativism” and “Trumpism.”

The Republican candidates’ and their billionaire donors’ behavior today eerily parallels that day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, “In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for.” President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace’s warnings are more urgent now than ever before.

If Trump and the billionaire fascists who bankroll the Republicans succeed in destroying the last supports for America’s enfeebled middle class, including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—and succeed in blocking any possibility of Medicare for All or free college and trade school—not only will the bottom 90 percent of Americans suffer, but what little democracy we have left in this republic will evaporate. History, from Greek and Roman times through Europe in the first half of the 20th century, suggests it will probably be replaced by a violent, kleptocratic oligarchy that no longer shrinks from words like “fascist.”

The warning signs are already here, and, in the face of nationwide election fraud based in Republican voter purges, we must turn out massive numbers if we’re to preserve the American Dream and finally make it available to all.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

OpEdNews - 11/11/2017 - From Thom Hartmann Blog

"It Doesn't Cost Billionaires Anything To Oppress You."

By Thom Hartmann:

There's a simple reason why Republicans default to the culture wars. It is because it doesn't cost their donor class any money.

If Republicans pass laws banning transgender people from bathrooms, that doesn't hurt the Koch brothers, it doesn't hurt Sheldon Adelson, it doesn't affect them at all.

If the Republicans pass legislation saying that Muslims can't run for political office, unless there's a Muslim right-wing billionaire out there it doesn't affect them.

And that's why Republicans attack gay people and the whole spectrum of LGBT, they attack people of color, they attack people whose first language isn't English, they attack immigrants, because none of those attacks cost the donor class of the Republican Party a single penny.

The Republicans will never ever speak out against pollution because the donor class is making money on that, against guns because the donor class is making money on that, against the obscene profits the pharmaceutical industry is making because the Republican donor class is making money off that.

Many industries are making obscene profits as a consequence of the extraordinary expansion of our trademark and copyright laws, largely at the behest of companies like Disney and Microsoft, so that those companies have these government-granted monopolies that last for centuries in some cases, decades certainly.

The Republicans will never talk about any of those things because those are the things that affect their donor class but they will enthusiastically kick around people of color.

The good news here is that the Republicans went all-in on Trump's racism over the last three weeks in Virginia. Ed Gillespie, everybody thought it was going to be a neck-and-neck race.

Ed Gillespie went in full racism in the last couple weeks of this election and it looks like it actually hurt his numbers, and when the Republicans figure that out then the donor class will start being concerned about race.

The billionaire class will get that they can't just rely on the votes of white people anymore.

https://www.opednews.com/articles/It-Doesn-t-Cost-Billionair-by-Thom-Hartmann-Billionaires_Election_Republican-171111-941.html