Alternet.org

Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans without any consequence. Mitch took you and me hostage back in May, when the House of Representatives passed the HEROES act that would have funded state and local governments and provided unemployed workers with an ongoing weekly payment.

Those who forget history, the old saying goes, are doomed to repeat it. “Lawmakers on both sides indicated Tuesday that the Republican-dominated Legislature will call a special session by the end of the week to appoint its own slate of delegates to the electoral college,” wrote Jeffrey Gettleman for The Los Angeles Times on November 29, 2000.

America's first COVID death was on February 29 of this year, roughly 200 days ago. In that time, more than 200,000 Americans have died of the disease, the equivalent of 1,000 people a day. That's how many people would have died if between February 29 and today three fully-loaded jumbo jets had crashed every single day, even on weekends, for 200 days.

Donald Trump became president by exploiting a loophole called the Electoral College. The majority of Americans did not want him or vote for him as president, but he’s there anyway. Now he’s planning on using a different loophole, the 12th Amendment, to hang onto power.

"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost." —Thomas Jefferson in 1786, to his close friend Dr. James Currie In 1983, 90% of the American media landscape (including magazines, books, music, news feeds, newspapers, movies, radio, and television) was dominated by 50 conglomerates.

The cover story of the December 2019 edition of The Atlantic magazine, founded itself in the years just before the Civil War, was ominously titled, “How to Stop a Civil War.” If we are, indeed, on the brink of a second Civil War, it’s already being waged as a “cold war,” with the occasional armed skirmish being provoked by the so-called Alt-Right movement, which, as of summer, 2020, had murdered thousands of Americans since Tim McVeigh kicked off the modern “boogaloo” white supremacy era.

It’s showing up in the obituaries. People in the throes of agony from losing someone close to them are writing things like, “Instead of flowers, donate to a Democrat,” or “Instead of flowers, tell everyone to vote against Trump and the GOP this fall.” It’s become a national trend. But not everyone is mourning. Billionaire Rupert Murdoch and the multimillionaires who comment on his Fox News network every night are very happy with the giant tax cuts and deregulation that Donald Trump has given them.

We have now reached peak Libertarianism, and this bizarre experiment that has been promoted by the billionaire class for over 40 years is literally killing us. Back in the years before Reagan, a real estate lobbying group called the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) came up with the idea of creating a political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money. The party would give them ideological and political cover, and they developed an elaborate theology around it.

The bizarre “conservative” idea of “freedom” has struck again. Margaret Sullivan reported in the Washington Post on a new study that shows what we all intuited: people who get their news from Fox and right-wing hate radio—both promoting the idea that the economy is more important than your health—are less likely to understand the reality of COVID-19 and therefore more likely to get sick and cause themselves and others to die. The bizarre “conservative” idea of “freedom” has struck again. Margaret Sullivan reported in the Washington Post on a new study that shows what we all intuited: people who get their news from Fox and right-wing hate radio—both promoting the idea that the economy is more important than your health—are less likely to understand the reality of COVID-19 and therefore more likely to get sick and cause themselves and others to die.

When you tell people they won’t be held accountable for their actions, it almost always ends badly. That’s what’s happened with our police and our social media, two institutional pillars of personal and political society in America today. Removing those dual immunities could dramatically change—for the better—the lives of millions of Americans. For police, the doctrine of “qualified immunity” first took hold in 1967 in the Supreme Court case Pierson v. Ray, when it was used “to shield white police officers from a lawsuit they faced for enforcing segregation,” as the Princetonian editorial board wrote recently.