Thom Hartmann Quotes

This legal situation is not only bizarre but also quite the opposite of the vision for this country held by the Founders of the nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn't even include in the Constititution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War). The American Revolution... was in fact provoked by the misbehavior of a British corporation; our nation was founded in an anti-corporate-power fury.

Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who would run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. “American fascism will not be really dangerous,” he added in the next paragraph, “until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information...”

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America: If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary notes, fascism/corporatism is “an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state.” Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that Thomas Jefferson identified as the ones that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as “rule by the rich.”

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.”...Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled “The Doctrine of Fascism” he wrote, “If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.” But not a government of, by, and for We The People—instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.

Given how reactive hard right snowflakes have gotten in response to a few truth-based jokes from Michelle Wolf, and that Mick Mulvaney has confessed to running a pay-for-play operation out of his congressional office, and Trump is daily breaking the Constitution’s emoluments clause, now might be a really good time to examine the origins and nature of the whole right-wing business/government model known as “fascism.”

Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it.

This aspect of xenophobic immigrant-hating, along with the insanity of the U.S. allowing AR-15s and other weapons of war on our streets, must be discussed along with the horrors of anti-Semitism. This is all one package brought to us by Trump, and it’s beginning to eerily resemble a previous insecure man with little hands, a single testicle, and a big mouth in the 1930s who warned his people about both immigrants and Jews.

A few days after another white terrorist (“history of mental illness,” said the media) with Trump and Fox graphics and slogans all over his van attempted the largest political assassination in U.S. history, we now have the single most lethal attack on Jews in this country’s history—in part because their synagogue supported helping immigrants coming into America. And all of it being amped up, day after day, over and over again, by Trump.

For people who are freaked out about Trump and freaked out about the world... and everything else, meditation is like a really, really good thing. It's a way for us to kind of ground ourselves.

All of these social ills come out of a small group of people... literally just a few thousand people in the United States or a few thousand families in the US owning something like 70 -80 percent of the entire wealth of the country. Three guys owning 50% of the wealth of the entire country... Wealth inequality in the US is worse than it's ever been, even worse than it was in 1929 which brought about the great crash...I think it's a mental illness... these guys have obsessive compulsive disorder, they're hoarders."

Inequality fuels social problems like crime, homelessness, drug addiction, teen and unwanted pregnancies. The only people it's good for are the Billionaires and morbidly rich. *The greater the distance between the very rich & the very poor, the more unequal a society is... the more, the higher the rates you have of diseases of all kinds, of drug addiction, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, of unwanted pregnancies, and abortions as well... of crimes of homicide and suicide... high higher rates of mental illness, depression, lower rates of social engagement, lower rates of civic participation, including voting.

GOP & Trump Are Using Fear & Rhetoric Because They Have Nothing Else to Run On - Even republicans know the tax cut is a scam & want Medicare-For-All

And this is a genuine crisis for America because if President Biden is frustrated in his attempt to pass his Build Back Better legislation (that is overwhelmingly supported by Americans across the political spectrum) — all because business groups, giant corporations and rightwing billionaires are asserting ownership over their two “made” senators — there’s a very good chance that today’s cynicism and political violence is just a preview of the rest of the decade. But this isn’t as much a story about Sinema as it is about today’s larger political dysfunction for which she’s become, along with Joe Manchin, a poster child. Increasingly, because of the Supreme Court’s betrayal of American values, it’s become impossible for people like the younger Sinema to rise from social worker to the United States Senate without big money behind them.... While the naked corruption of Sinema and Joe Manchin is a source of outrage for Democrats across America, what’s far more important is that it reveals how deep the rot of money in American politics has gone, thanks entirely to a corrupted Supreme Court. In Justice Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United, he pointed out that corporations in their modern form didn’t even exist when the Constitution was written...

When Bobby Kennedy went after organized crime in the early 1960s, one of the things he learned was that the Mafia had a series of rituals new members went through to declare their loyalty and promise they’d never turn away from their new benefactors. Once in, they’d be showered with money and protection, but they could never leave and even faced serious problems if they betrayed the syndicate. Which brings us to the story of Kyrsten Sinema. For a republican democracy to actually work, average citizens with a passion for making their country better must be able to run for public office without needing wealthy or powerful patrons; this is a concept that dates back to Aristotle’s rants on the topic. And Sinema... Apparently... she decided that if you can only barely beat them, you’d damn well better join them. Sinema quickly joined other Democrats who’d followed the Citizens United path to the flashing neon lights of big money, joining the so-called “Problem Solvers” caucus that owes its existence in part to the Wall Street-funded front group “No Labels.” ... Political networks run by rightwing billionaires and the US Chamber of Commerce showered her with support... She’d proved herself as a “made woman,” just like the old mafiosi documented by RFK in the 1960s, willing to do whatever it takes, compromise whatever principles she espoused...