"America First": A History

"Fareed Zakaria examines America's isolationist roots from the Founding Fathers to today. With the Republican Party's embrace of Donald Trump's "America First" policy, what shape might the world take under a second Trump presidency?"

Click on this link for a 45-minute video presenting all you need to know about the USA and its "America First" Achilles Heel.

History Is At Least Rhyming

"In the episode we’re about to share, Sean Illing and his guest, historian Edward Watts, discuss how America today feels like ancient Rome…right before its empire collapsed."

Click on the link below for a podcast that examines the psychological and historical aspects of the present and potential future of the USA.

The Gray Area: Is America collapsing like ancient Rome? 

A Look At The US's Historical Battle Regarding Liberalism

"When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine 'liberal' as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few."

Click here for a perspective from my favorite American historian, Heather Cox Richardson.

The History Of Modern Science

"Modern science is generally considered to have originated in Western Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries. However, there are different views on when exactly it began, including:

• The High Middle Ages: Some say that modern science began in 1277.

• The Italian Renaissance: Others believe that the Italian Renaissance was a rebirth of the sciences.

• The Scientific Revolution: This period is traditionally thought to have begun with the Copernican Revolution in 1543 and ended with Isaac Newton's Principia in 1687.

• The 17th century: Some say that modern science began in the 17th century when the world was examined more closely with instruments like the telescope, microscope, clock, and barometer.

(AI Overview)

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No matter the EXACT date, it has been within humanity for several centuries and has advanced exponentially since the above. And yet, the majority of humanity has no clue about it.

What If Nazism Had Won? It Has In The USA

"If Adolf Hitler had won World War II, Europe would have been drastically reshaped under Nazi rule, with devastating consequences for its people and cultures. Hitler’s vision, outlined in Mein Kampf and Nazi ideology, called for a hierarchical society dominated by the so-called 'Aryan master race.' Countries across Europe would have been reorganized into puppet states or directly incorporated into a vast German empire, while the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe faced enslavement or extermination to make room for German settlers. 

"The Holocaust, which claimed the lives of six million Jews, could have expanded even further under a Nazi victory. With no Allied forces to stop them, the Nazis might have fully implemented their plans for the genocide of other groups they deemed "undesirable," such as the Roma people, political dissidents, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people with disabilities. The cultural and intellectual diversity of Europe would have been irreparably destroyed, as the Nazi regime sought to homogenize society under its oppressive rule. 

"Economically, Europe would have become a continent of exploitation, with German industry thriving at the expense of enslaved labor and plundered resources from occupied territories. Countries like France, Poland, and the Netherlands would have been forced into servitude, with their economies subjugated to fuel the ambitions of the Third Reich. Resistance movements and uprisings might have continued, but they would likely have been brutally crushed, leaving little hope for freedom under the Nazi regime. 

"In the long term, a Nazi-dominated Europe would have isolated itself from the rest of the world, fostering a climate of fear, oppression, and cultural stagnation. The United States, the Soviet Union, and other nations outside of Europe might have become counterbalances to Nazi power, but the cost of such a world would have been unimaginable. Europe, as we know it today—a place of unity, diversity, and shared values—would have been replaced by a dark and oppressive dystopia under Nazi control."

Click on the link below for a half-hour video presenting a "What If" that is a reality in the USA with MAGA winning:

What Would Europe Be Like If Adolf Hitler Had Won World War II?

A History Of Medical Quackery

"Strange, weird or wonderful? You decide. The Vintage practices selling false hope. This practice preyed upon persons who suffered from diseases that may have had no complete medical cures. Unregulated once, this practice thrived with false or unproven claims of cures using strange ingredients or bizarre materials, often with dire consequences for the end user."

Click on this link for the details. It's a shame that, with today's knowledge, this sh!t still is a major problem. The cure? Universal education in critical/science-based thinking, beginning at an early age (to negate the religious indoctrination that most go through as children).

Even In The Best Of Times, The Poor Have Always Been Neglected

"A Golden Age is a period of 'peace, prosperity, and happiness.' Early Greek and Roman poets used the phrase to describe how people lived in an almost idealized time and place. It is a point in history where art, science, and philosophy thrive, and where economic growth is unparalleled. But not everyone gets to enjoy that prosperity..."

Throughout known history, humanity has always ignored the needs of the poor. Memo to MAGA: the USA has never been great. Click on the link below for a history lesson on this fact:

What It Was Like To Be Poor Throughout History

What Bezos and Musk really want from Trump - Robert Reich Oct 31

Elon Musk (worth $271 billion) and Jeff Bezos (worth $262 billion) — the richest and second-richest people on the planet — are now showing America why it’s dangerous to have great wealth concentrated in so few hands.

In August 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million. On Friday, just as the Post was preparing to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Bezos stopped the paper from doing so.

Partly as a result, the Post has already lost 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its subscriber base.

In October 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billon, turned it into X, and became its biggest user, with 202 million followers.

Musk has endorsed Trump — and weaponized the platform into a supporter of Trump, smeared Harris, and amplified rumors and conspiracy theories.

Independent analysts such as Edison Research said in March that X’s usage in the United States dropped 30 percent since last year. Fidelity this month estimated that X’s value has plunged by about 80 percent since Musk’s takeover.

Why have these two oligarchs been willing to take actions that cause so many of their customers to jump ship? What’s the connection between Bezos’s preventing the Post from endorsing Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump?

Here’s a hint:

Just hours after Bezos stopped the Post from endorsing Harris, executives of Blue Origin, Bezos’s private rocket company, met with Trump in Austin.

Although Blue Origin is running far behind Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos is the most likely serious challenger to Musk’s dominance in space because of his personal fortune and his billions of dollars in government contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense.

For years, Bezos has focused on beating Musk for the multibillion-dollar contracts to launch payloads and rockets. “Elon’s real superpower is getting government money,” Bezos said in 2016, according to the Post. “From now on, we go after everything that SpaceX bids on.”

Musk’s company appears so far ahead in the competition that it won a contract to rescue astronauts stuck at the International Space Station.

But that could change. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been looking to unload their own joint-venture rocket company, United Launch Alliance (ULA), which has billions of dollars in government contracts, extensive infrastructure, and an experienced team.

Bezos’s Blue Origin is reportedly the favorite to take over ULA. Even the head of the U.S. Space Force’s purchases seems to be pushing for the two rocket companies to merge, telling an industry audience that “they need to scale” in order to meet an aggressive launch schedule.

ULA is still a major force in the space industry, competing for dozens of launches over the next four years, which can bring in billions more revenue. Combining with Blue Origin would make a lot of sense. The Wall Street Journal reports that Blue Origin has already submitted a bid to buy ULA.

If that’s the goal, Bezos’s biggest obstacle would be Trump, should Trump get back in the White House.

Trump has been out to get Bezos since 2017, when Trump first started blaming Bezos for poor coverage in The Washington Post — a grievance that has hurt Blue Origin.

In April 2019, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff alerted Blue Origin officials to Bezos’s poor reputation in the White House, telling them that they have a “Washington Post problem.”

Trump also said he wanted to “screw Amazon” out of a $10 billion deal to provide cloud computing to the Pentagon, according to a memoir by his Defense Secretary James Mattis. (It’s since been reported that Oracle, led by Larry Ellison — Trump donor, Musk mentor, and Oracle founder, who ranks just behind Musk and Bezos as the third-richest person in America with an estimated $211.2 billion in wealth — had sought to sabotage the deal.)

So Bezos has been courting Trump. After Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet during an attempted assassination at a July campaign rally, prompting a Musk endorsement of the former president, Bezos called Trump to say how impressed he was that the candidate had raised his fist after coming under fire, according to a person familiar with that conversation.

Soon after Trump formally secured the Republican nomination, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy phoned Trump, introducing himself and outlining the company’s plans for the future. The call concluded with Trump suggesting that the company cut a large check for his presidential efforts, according to two people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount the private discussion. Trump told Jassy that he was going to win the election and that Amazon should help him because it would be in the company’s best interests.

In this sense, then, both Bezos’s refusal to allow The Washington Post to endorse Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump can be seen as moves in a proxy war for dominance in government contracting of spaceflight, where the ultimate prize will be hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars — thereby distending the fortunes of either Bezos or Musk.

But the casualty in this war is American democracy, for which neither Bezos nor Musk apparently has a scintilla of concern.

America is now in its second Gilded Age, in which a handful of supremely wealthy men are determining the nation’s future. We must not let them. Bezos should never have been able to purchase The Washington Post in the first place; his conflicting business interests should have prevented it.

Nor should Musk have been able to buy Twitter. Antitrust laws should have been used to break Twitter up, or the platform should be deemed a public utility.

Both Bezos and Musk are poster boys for the importance of a wealth tax, which must be enacted to prevent the grotesque accumulations of wealth that have allowed them to wield such extraordinary power.

When the smoke clears from this rancorous presidential campaign and Kamala Harris is president, she must rescue democracy from these and other oligarchs.

As the eminent jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said near the end of America’s first Gilded Age, “America has a choice. We can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy. But we cannot have both.”

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Heather Cox Richardson: from Letters from an American - October 30, 2024

On Friday, October 25, at a town hall held on his social media platform X, Elon Musk told the audience that if Trump wins, he expects to work in a Cabinet-level position to cut the federal government.

He told people to expect “temporary hardship” but that cuts would “ensure long-term prosperity.” At the Trump rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Musk said he plans to cut $2 trillion from the government. Economists point out that current discretionary spending in the budget is $1.7 trillion, meaning his promise would eliminate virtually all discretionary spending, which includes transportation, education, housing, and environmental programs.

Economists agree that Trump’s plans to place a high tariff wall around the U.S., replacing income taxes on high earners with tariffs paid for by middle-class Americans, and to deport as many as 20 million immigrants would crash the booming economy. Now Trump’s financial backer Musk is factoring in the loss of entire sectors of the government to the economy under Trump.  

Trump has promised to appoint Musk to be the government’s “chief efficiency officer.” “Everyone’s going to have to take a haircut.… We can’t be a wastrel.… We need to live honestly,” Musk said on Friday. Rob Wile and Lora Kolodny of CNBC point out that Musk’s SpaceX aerospace venture has received $19 billion from the U.S. government since 2008.

An X user wrote: “I]f Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit—there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy…. Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.”

Musk commented: “Sounds about right[.]”

This exchange echoes the prescription of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose theories had done much to create the Great Crash of 1929, for restoring a healthy economy. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living

will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” 

Mellon, at least, was reacting to an economic crisis thrust upon an administration. Musk is seeking to create one. 

Today the Commerce Department reported that from July through September, the nation’s economy grew at a solid 2.8%. Consumer spending is up, as is investment in business. The country added 254,000 jobs in September, and inflation has fallen back almost to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. 

It is extraordinarily rare for a country to be able to reduce inflation without creating a recession, but the Biden administration has managed to do so, producing what economists call a “soft landing,” rather like catching an egg on a plate. As Bryan Mena of CNN wrote today: “The US economy seems to have pulled off a remarkable and historic achievement.” 

Both President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have called for reducing the deficit not by slashing the government, as Musk proposes, but by restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations. 

As part of the Republicans’ plan to take the country back to the era before the 1930s ushered in a government that regulated business and provided a basic social safety net, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expects to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. 

At a closed-door campaign event on Monday in Pennsylvania for a Republican House candidate, Johnson told supporters that Republicans will propose “massive reform” to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” if they take control of both the House and the Senate in November. “Health-care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson said. Their plan is to take a “blowtorch to the regulatory state,” which he says is “crushing the free market.” “Trump’s going to go big,” he said.” When an attendee asked, “No Obamacare?” he laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare…. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.” 

Ending a campaign with a promise to crash a booming economy and end the Affordable Care Act, which ended insurance companies’ ability to reject people with preexisting conditions, is an unusual strategy.

A post from Trump last night and another this morning suggest his internal polls are worrying him. Last night he claimed there was cheating in Pennsylvania’s York and Lancaster counties. Today he posted: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!” 

Trump appears to be setting up the argument he used in 2020, that he can lose only if he has been cheated. But it is increasingly apparent that the get-out-the-vote, or GOTV, efforts of the Trump campaign have been weak. When Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and loyalist Michael Whatley became the co-chairs of the Republican National Committee in March 2024, they stopped the GOTV efforts underway and used the money instead for litigation. They outsourced GOTV efforts to super PACs, including Musk’s America PAC.

In Wired today, Jake Lahut reported that door-knockers for Musk’s PAC were driven around in the back of a U-Haul without seats and threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet high canvassing quotas. One of the canvassers told Lahut that they thought they were being hired to ask people who they would be voting for when they flew into Michigan, and was surprised to learn their actual role. The workers spoke to Lahut anonymously because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement (a practice the Biden administration has tried to stop).

Trump’s boast that he is responsible for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion is one of the reasons his support is soft. In addition to popular dislike of the idea that the state, rather than a woman and her doctor, should make decisions about her healthcare, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision is now over two years old, and state examinations of maternal deaths are showing that women are dying from lack of reproductive healthcare. 

Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica reported today that at least two pregnant women have died in Texas when doctors delayed emergency care after a miscarriage until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The woman they highlighted today, Josseli Barnica, left behind a husband and a toddler. 

At a rally this evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump said his team had advised him to stop talking about how he was going to protect women by ending crime and making sure they don’t have to be “thinking about abortion.” But Trump, who has boasted of sexual assault and been found liable for it, did not stop there. He went on to say that he had told his advisors, “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.” 

The Trump campaign remains concerned about the damage caused by the extraordinarily racist, sexist, and violent Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden. Today the campaign seized on a misstatement President Biden made when condemning the statement from the Madison Square Garden event that referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” They tried to turn the tables to suggest that Biden was calling Trump supporters garbage, although the president has always been very careful to focus his condemnation on Trump alone. 

In Wisconsin today, when he disembarked from his plane, Trump put on an orange reflective vest and had someone drive him around the tarmac in a garbage truck with TRUMP painted on the side. He complained about Biden to reporters from the cab of the truck but still refused to apologize for Sunday’s slur of Puerto Rico, saying he knew nothing about the comedian who appeared at his rally. 

This, too, was an unusual strategy. Like his visit to McDonalds, where he wore an apron, the image of Trump in a sanitation truck was likely intended to show him as a man of the people. But his power has always rested not in his promise to be one of the people, but rather to lead them. The pictures of him in a bright orange vest and unusually dark makeup are quite different from his usual portrayal of himself.

Indeed, media captured a video of Trump’s stunt, and it did not convey strength. MSNBC’s Katie Phang watched him try to get into the truck and noted: “Trump stumbles, drags his right leg, almost falls over, and tries at least three times to open the door…. Some transparency with Trump’s medical records would be nice.” 

The Las Vegas Sun today ran an editorial that detailed Trump’s increasingly obvious mental lapses and concluded that Trump is “crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.” It noted that Trump now depends “on enablers who show a disturbing willingness to indulge his delusions, amplify his paranoia or steer his feeble mind toward their own goals.” It noted that if Trump cannot fulfill the duties of the presidency, they would fall to his running mate, J.D. Vance, who has suggested “he would subordinate constitutional principles for personal profit and power.”

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Fascism 101

"Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed 'to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.'

"On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was 'FASCISM!'”

Click on this link, from my favorite historian specializing in the USA, to learn how the military educated the troops in Europe about what they were fighting during World War II. This is EXACTLY what is needed now to inform the entire electorate that the USA is in imminent danger of fascism again, this time WITHIN THE USA in the form of Donald Trump and the Republican Party!

The Republican Party: From Greatness To A Traitor Dictator

"Something seriously troubling has happened to the Republican Party. It’s become filled with wacko candidates for office who are being supported by large percentages of Republican voters.

"The trend started in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program, which attracted a wide audience with a toxic mixture of lies, conspiracy theories, fear-mongering, and thinly veiled racism.

"It accelerated in 1996 when Rupert Murdoch hired Roger Ailes to emulate Limbaugh with a new TV channel, Fox News. Additional media imitators followed.

"The growing supply of this poison offered the (predominantly) white working-class an easy explanation for why the wages and status of many blue-collar men had hit the skids: They could blame immigrants, Black people, Latinos, “coastal elites,” government bureaucrats, pedophiles, women, secularists, Muslims, liberals, Democrats, and Satan."

Click on the link below for a brief history of the failure of one of the two major US political parties:

How did the GOP become the party of cranks and crackpots?

"Socialism"/"Communism" Is Saving The USA

"The federal government’s efficient organization of responses to natural disasters illustrates that as citizens of a republic, we are part of a larger community that responds to our needs in times of crisis.

"But that system is currently under attack. Project 2025, a playbook for the next Republican administration, authored by allies of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and closely associated with Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate Ohio senator J.D. Vance, calls for slashing FEMA’s budget and returning disaster responses to states and localities.

"Project 2025 also calls for dismantling the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and either eliminating its functions, sending them to other agencies, privatizing them, or putting them under the control of states and territories. It complains that NOAA, whose duties include issuing hurricane warnings, is 'one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.'"

Click on this link for a history lesson on the importance of federal over state/local efforts during major disasters. Understand the lies coming from conservative sources: Democrats do not want the government to control the means of production (socialism) or to end private ownership (communism). They want regulated capitalism under a representative democracy.

The Difference Is Stark: Vote Wisely

"The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in this election is stark, and it reflects a systemic problem that has been growing in the U.S. since the 1980s."

Click on this link from my favorite American historian for an informed summary of the positives of the Democrats and the negatives of the Republicans as the USA faces the most important vote since at least the Civil War.

Attacks On Education: The Base Of Dictatorships

"With democracy under threat around the world, author Jason Stanley warns that the fundamental danger lies closer to home: in the schools. In his latest book, the American philosopher argues that attacks on education empower authoritarian regimes by reshaping our understanding of the past. Stanley joins the show to discuss."

Click on the link below for the history of dictatorships in recent decades:

Russia, Nazi Germany, MAGA: The Dangers of Weaponizing History and Education

The Origin Of Religion

"The origin of the concepts of Spirit or Souls, because of the similarities between many religions, can be traced back to the small group of people, surviving the MIS 6 Glacial stage, to which all living humans are related."

Click on this link for a well-documented accounting of the similarities of most religions.

Finally Some Action Against Money Laundering

"Another major story from yesterday is that the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has finalized two rules that will work to stop corruption and money laundering in U.S. residential real estate and in private investment.

"This is a big deal. As scholar of kleptocracies Casey Michel put it: 'This is a massive, massive deal in the world of counter-kleptocracy—the U.S. is finally ending the gargantuan anti-money laundering loopholes for real estate, private equity, hedge funds, and more. Can't overstate how important this is. What a feat.'”

Click here for more information about money laundering in this installment of Heather Cox Richardson's regular "Letters from an American."

Mathematics Debunks Democracy

"Democracy might be mathematically impossible – here’s why."

Click here for a fascinating trip through the history of attempts to devise the perfect model for achieving a true and fair democracy.

A History Lesson of US Political Conventions

"In the early years of the American Republic, political leaders were faced with the practical problem of how, exactly, to create a democratic government. The Constitution provided a framework for how such a government should work, but it didn’t lay out how voters would interact with that framework. At first, that gap between voters and the machinery of politics didn’t seem to be much of a problem, since George Washington was so popular he essentially ran unopposed and the presidential electors voted for him unanimously. But then President Washington announced he would not run for a third term, and there was no consensus on who should take his place."

Click here for a look at the bowels of political conventions in the past.

The Pre-Civil War Democrats Are Today's Republicans

" - - - Republicans crossing the aisle in 2024 are returning to their party’s origins.

"The Republican Party itself began as a coalition that came together to stand against an oligarchy whose leaders were explicit about their determination to overthrow democracy. As wealth had accumulated in the hands of a small group of elite southern enslavers, those men had turned against American democracy. 'I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are created equal,’ South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond said.

"Enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia rejected the other key principle of the Declaration of Independence: that everyone has a right to a say in the government under which they live. 'We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’' he wrote in 1857. 'All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.' There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, '[b]ut we twelve hundred…never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.'

"Enslavers like Hammond and Fitzhugh believed that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to impose their will on everyone else. If they did not, men like Fitzhugh believed, poor men and marginalized people would insist on being equal, receiving the value of their work and living as they wished."

Click on this link to see how only the name has changed.

A Reminder: Democracy Requires Vigilance

"Every time we expand democracy, it seems we get complacent, thinking it’s a done deal. We forget that democracy is a process and that it’s never finished.

"And when we get complacent, people who want power use our system to take over the government. They get control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they begin to undermine the principle that we should be treated equally before the law and to chip away at the idea that we have a right to a say in our government. And it starts to seem like we have lost our democracy.

"But all the while, there are people who keep the faith. Lawmakers, of course, but also teachers and journalists and the musicians who push back against the fear by reminding us of love and family and community. And in those communities, people begin to organize—the marginalized people who are the first to feel the bite of reaction, and grassroots groups. They keep the embers of democracy alive."

Click on this link for more: