DT’s Revival of the American Spirit Is the Revival of Hate and Divisiveness

I’m sorry but I couldn’t watch the whole annual speech to our nation by the President. I did listen to a few news reports and analyses and read parts online, and a PBS fact check.

 

DT talked about the “Great American Comeback” while for three years he has been destroying our future, undermining the protections on our environment and thus the habitability of our world by rolling back regulations protecting our municipal water systems from sewage or protecting our air quality. He undermines our future by attacking the science that should inform environmental regulations and protections on public health.  He has been undermining public education. He undermines our national security not only by sudden and ill-informed reverses of foreign policy, as in Syria and Iran, but by undermining our relations with allies.

 

He further undermines our health not only with the environmental policies but by withholding monies for agencies that protect us from pandemics. He has cut the National Institute of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, the Agency for International Development, and dismantled the entire White House team in charge of global health security.  He has threatened to cut back Medicare, Medicaid, and, of course the Affordable Care Act.

 

He has been undermining our national union by attacking not only people of color, as in Charlottesville, etc, etc, and stimulating the hate that has exploded in attacks on synagogues, LGBTQ & others, and young people in schools, but also by his fluency with lies, which makes him seem to his followers the origin of all accepted truth.

 

I think his revival of the American spirit is really the revival of hate and divisiveness. But of course, maybe I will get criticized for sowing hate because I point out the truth of his hate.

 

Meanwhile, he claims America is doing well economically, there is high employment, and we have the biggest economy in the world. And biggest military. But his “good economy” serves the rich more than Mainstreet. We have one of the biggest debt rates in our modern history, thus making our nation more economically vulnerable in a crisis and making it difficult for us to come up with the needed money to improve our infrastructure and schools. The debt increases the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and shifts so much power to the rich that the rest of us will soon be left with little power. And his tax cuts have not only made the debt worse, but he proposes to help pay for these huge handouts to the rich by calling for cuts in the programs that serve and protect the majority of us, not only with the public health protections already mentioned and Medicare and Medicaid, but also Social Security. And meanwhile, half of America is living near the poverty level.

 

He undermines the very system we use to maintain a democracy, by disenfranchising millions of voters, destroying faith in our electoral system by resisting efforts to safeguard our election technology and, as illustrated by his Ukraine scandal, by calling for interference in the election by Russia and China. He undermines the rule of law and our constitution, as shown by his corruption, his impeachment in the House, the Mueller Investigation, his attacks on anyone who opposes him, and his own lawyer basically arguing on the Senate floor that whatever DT does is legal.

 

The House should now call John Bolton and Lev Parnas, and cut off the GOP victory dance. And then expose the GOP agenda of ripping off the American people by discussing health care, protecting Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security.

 

And sometime we need to do something about the lying in the media, the media which  insulates people in information or propaganda cocoons and incites violence. For example, a follower of DT and FOX News threatened to shoot Adam Schiff after his speech on the Senate floor about impeachment. The same person also threatened Mr. Schiff on October 1st, after DT said Schiff should be questioned for fraud and treason. As seen in the movie Vice, which is about Vice President Dick Cheney, once the Fairness Doctrine was ended in 1987, it allowed the media to give up any attempt at balanced and fact-based reporting. And DT continues to threaten Congressman Schiff.

 

And all of us who want to live in a nation of laws, who want influence on the political process, who want to be able to live without a threat of violence due to our gender identity and loves, friends, religion, economic class, or race, who want there to be a habitable world for ourselves and our children⎼ we have to not only vote but get others to vote.

 

For the New Year, Can We Have A Little More Fairness, Please! “Vice” and Speaking Out for the Fairness Doctrine

Last night, I went with my wife and two friends to see the movie Vice. The movie was about a Vice President, Dick Cheney, and also about one of the most destructive of vices, the lust for power.

The film was advertised as a comedy. And I did laugh, once. I snickered even more. And for most of the second half of the film, I wanted to rip apart the movie screen. It didn’t feel like a comedy.

The movie exposed many of the roots of our present political crisis in the Nixon, Reagan, and Cheney administrations. A few months ago, I wrote a blog exposing the economic underwear of the Trumpf GOP. I spoke about how wealth has been, since the 1980s, concentrated more and more into fewer and fewer hands, and how the role of the tax system in moderating the control by the rich of this nation was undermined.For example, in 2017, the top 1% owned 42.8% of the nation’s wealth. It has been increasing by 6% annually since the mid-2000s. America’s wealthiest 20 people now own more than the bottom half the population, own more than 152,000,000 people combined.

In that post, I also spoke about how Reagan, in 1987, ended the Fairness Doctrine. How many people today even remember that doctrine, which directed the behavior of broadcast media in this country for about 40 years? It was first spelled out by the FCC in 1949, during the Truman presidency. According to economist George Tyler in his book the Billionaire Democracy: The Hijacking of the American Political System,this doctrine obliged broadcasters to give equal and factual coverage to all sides of an issue and all candidates for office. It included a requirement that anyone victimized by an online attack be given equal time for a prompt response. It was ended by claims by the Reagan FCC that the Fairness Doctrine “restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters.” As if asking journalists to be honest and base their reporting on reliable and verifiable sources of information is an infringement of their freedom.

The book and movie described how, by ending the Fairness Doctrine, not only was Fox News created as the propaganda organ of the right wing rich, but the concentrated assault on truth that we now see daily was begun. …

To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project, which published it.