Thom Hartmann

The ugly face of Republican authoritarianism.

The meme that I was hearing over and over after the Florida shooting, and I was yelling at the TV, the meme that they kept promoting that was making me so crazy was, "oh, if you see something, say something - we should have been able to see this coming." As if to say that only in the United States do we have people who have mental illness problems. This is just total crap.

This should be the metric by which we determine what is public and what is private - public being government-run, we all own it collectively, and private being privately owned, it's owned by capitalists, essentially.

Everybody has the right to education. It's a basic right. Everybody has the right to housing. It's a basic right. Everyone has the right to food. It's a basic right.

This is fascinating because the Trumpistas, the Republicans, just released a budget which is going to cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps. It's going to cut everything. It's just right across the board, it's three trillion dollars in cuts over a ten-year period. Three hundred billion dollars a year. And what that means is that during bad times things are so much worse.

Meagan Day writing over at Jacobin magazine is quoting from a new study that was published in Psychological Bulletin written by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill. And what this absolutely fascinating study found was behavioral and psychological changes in the American population, and these changes are most pronounced among people under 50, down into the end of the Millennials in particular, but it stretches right across the United States.

W.J. Hennigan wrote a fairly lengthy piece in Time magazine on the first of February. He writes:

The corruption of small D democracy, the corruption of human rights, the corruption of civil rights, the destruction, actually, of civil and human rights, the destruction of the public sphere, the the deconstruction of government - or as Steve Bannon famously said, the deconstruction of the administrative state, in other words taking apart government.

In his State of the Union speech this week Donald Trump asked Congress to give him the power to purge cabinet agencies. He said:

Chuck Butler does a daily newsletter called the Daily Pfennig - the German word for penny - and he talked about a Minsky moment in bonds in yesterday's newsletter.